Jemaah Islamiyah (translated as “Islamic community”) is an Islamist extremist group in Indonesia that seeks to overthrow the Indonesian government and create a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia.[3] JI has ideological origins in the Darul Islam (DI) movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in which insurgents of West Javanese descent carried out a violent campaign with the goal of establishing an Islamic state in Indonesia.[4] The exact nature of JI’s relationship to DI is debated. The group has been characterized as an “offshoot” of DI motivated to organize either in response to government suppression of DI leaders or as a result of internal conflict within DI.[5]
Experts disagree on the exact date that JI was founded as an organization. Estimates range from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, suggesting that the group coalesced over time before formalizing.[6] The group was founded by Yemeni-born Indonesian clerics Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Ba’asyir. Despite both being co-founders, Sungkar served as JI’s emir, or top leader, providing the group with inspiration and direction, while Ba’asyir was his second in command.[7] In 1972, Sungkar and Ba’asyir set up a pesantren, or Islamic boarding school, called Pesantren al Mukmin in the city of Solo on the Indonesian island of Java to promote jihadist teachings. In 1973, the school moved to the village of Ngruki and subsequently became known as Pondok Ngruki. In the years after its founding, graduates of Pondok Ngruki set up similar pesantren in locations throughout the country, creating a network of schools that served as recruiting bases for JI. Many of the militants involved in JI’s major terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Bali bombings, the 2003 Marriott bombings, and the 2004 Australian embassy bombings, had direct ties to several of the most prominent schools in the network.[8]
In the late 1980s, Sungkar and Ba’asyir fled to Malaysia to evade prison sentences for their ties to DI.[9] There, they sent fighters to join the Islamic insurgents fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.[10] While in Afghanistan, these fighters were exposed to different ideologies, including Wahhabism and Salafism, that would later influence the group’s political goals and violent tactics.[11] Additionally, the militants gained valuable military training and forged links with other militants fighting in Afghanistan. These connections laid the groundwork of JI’s ties Al Qaeda (AQ) and a broader network of Southeast Asian militant organizations.[12]
In the early 1990s, Sungkar drew on the militants who had fought in Afghanistan to form the “backbone” of his new JI organization.[13] In 1996, a JI committee authored the “General Guide for the Struggle of Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyah,” which served as a reference manual for senior JI members. The manual asserted JI’s goals – to establish an Islamic Caliphate – and outlined the stages of organizational development necessary to achieve those goals. It also provided information about JI’s internal structures and methods of carrying out operations.[14]
Throughout the 1990s, JI militants traveled to Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Many of JI’s men trained in Afghanistan from the early- through mid-1990s. Some of these training camps were affiliated with Al Qaeda (AQ).[15] In addition to training, JI reportedly received resources and advising from AQ throughout its formation.[16] By the mid-1990s, Sungkar had established training camps in the Philippines. This helped to strengthen the relationship between JI and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an Islamic separatist organization based in the southern Philippines.[17] JI relocated to Indonesia after political and economic crises in 1998 forced Indonesian President Suharto to resign from office. Shortly thereafter, Sungkar died from natural causesBa’asyir subsequently took control of the group to the dismay of many of Sungkar’s Indonesian recruits, who saw him as weak and overly accommodating.[18] Under Ba’asyir’s leadership, splits began to develop within JI over the group’s strategy. Soon, two divergent factions emerged, including a “moderate majority” wing, which opposed violent action against innocent civilians, and a “radical minority” wing led by Hambali (a regional head of JI), which supported such action. Ba’asyir sided with the latter wing, thereby allowing Hambali to radicalize the organization and direct its activities. With Hambali serving as JI’s operational leader, Ba’asyir’s role became limited to providing the group with ideological and inspirational leadership.[19]
Conflict erupted between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia in 1999 and 2000 during the country’s transition to democracy. JI fighters gained operational experience by attacking Christian churches and priests – particularly in West Java, Sumatra, and Lombok – in response to massacres of Muslims by Christians.[20] The group was responsible for a string of church bombings in Indonesia in December 2000 that killed eighteen, as well as a series of bombings in Manila in the same month that killed twenty-two.[21]
In the early 2000s, JI began to focus its attacks on Western targets, a shift that was reflected in its actions and then publicly announced by Ba’asyir in 2002. In December 2001, Singapore officials foiled a JI plot to attack U.S., Israeli, British, and Australian diplomatic buildings in Singapore.[22] Subsequent attacks on public spaces like malls, hotels, and restaurants demonstrated that the organization also seemed to become more willing to accept collateral loss of Muslim life.[23] In October 2002, JI perpetrated its most notorious attack when it bombed two Bali nightclubs popular with foreign tourists, especially Australians, killing 202.[24]
Governments in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines actively pursued JI within their own borders. The Indonesian government, however, initially resisted pressure from the United States and other neighboring states to crack down on the group.[25] Indonesia largely refused to acknowledge the presence of a nation-wide Islamic terrorist threat and was unwilling to campaign against this threat in front of its Muslim-majority population that doubted JI’s existence.[26] Indonesia was also undergoing a number of political changes, corruption scandals, and other instances of communal violence at the time that consumed the government’s attention.[27]
Following JI’s 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesian authorities joined other governments in cracking down on the group. In response, some of JI’s leadership sought to abandon mass-casualty terrorism and distance itself from AQ’s calls to attack Western targets.[28] While JI’s ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state across Southeast Asia endured, the group officially began to focus on education and religious outreach. This shift away from violence catalyzed the group’s fragmentation. Hard-line members set about forming violent splinter cells that went on to mount attacks that were often attributed to JI as a whole. Notably, between 2003 and 2009, a JI splinter cell led by Noordin Mohammed Top – later known as Al Qaeda in the Malay Archipelago or Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad – carried out several attacks that did not follow typical JI practices or were not directly ordered by the JI leadership. It is unclear whether Top was directly connected to Al Qaeda (AQ), but he emulated the group and adopted the nom de guerre “Aiman” after one of AQ’s leaders.[29] Top’s cell was tied to the attacks of the JW Marriot Hotel in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in 2004, the 2005 Bali bombing, and the suicide bombings at two Western hotels in Jakarta in July 2009.[30] Top was killed in a shoot-out with Indonesian authorities in 2009.[31]
By the mid-2000s, counterterrorism efforts had begun to seriously degrade JI’s operational capabilities. Between 2002 and 2013, governments in Southeast Asia – including Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia – arrested over 400 people with potential ties to the group. These arrests included JI’s operational chief in 2003 and several senior officials, such as Para Wijayanto in 2019 and Aries Sumarsono (known as Zulkarnaen) in 2020. Security forces have killed a number of JI’s leaders as well, including the group’s senior bomb-maker in 2005, operational leader Noordin Mohammed Top in 2009, and senior leader Sanusi in November 2012.[32]
These increased efforts to target JI members not only decimated organizational leadership but also forced the remaining leaders to rethink the group’s strategy, disagreements over which led the group to fragment through 2010.[33] After JI’s leaders seemed to set the group on a firm path to becoming a nonviolent organization, Ba’asyir left in 2008 to form a new organization, Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT).[34] In 2010, Ba’asyir was arrested and then convicted the following year for operating a militant training camp in Aceh, Indonesia, funded by JAT. He was sentenced to fifteen years in jail.[35] The last attack associated with JI came in July 2009, when suicide bombers attacked the JW Marriot and Ritz-Carlton in Jakarta, killing seven and injuring over fifty.[36] Shortly after, a JI faction led by Noordin Mohammed Top appeared to claim responsibility for the attack.[37] Since then, JI splinter groups and other Indonesian militant organizations, including those loyal to the Islamic State (IS), have been more active and received more media attention than JI.[38] In 2014, Ba’ayshir allegedly declared his support for tIS from prison.[39] According to some experts, JI is firmly anti-IS and remains linked to al-Qaeda. However, Australian authorities claim that JI has pledged allegiance to the IS movement.[40]
Despite JI’s relative dormancy in past few years and the arrests and killings of many of its high-ranking leaders, most experts agree that JI remains a danger.[41] According to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), a Jakarta-based think tank, Jemaah Islamiyah is not an “immediate threat,” but rather one with a “25-year-time frame for achieving an Islamic State.”[42] Similarly, Bilveer Singh of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) notes that JI has “adopted a strategic decision to lie low in line with the concept of I’dad,” which calls for “in-depth preparation to participate in a future jihad.”[43] Moreover, while JI has not undertaken a terrorist attack in recent years, the group never officially renounced violence and has continued to recruit new members, raise funds and, since 2010, rebuild its military wing.[44] Further contributing to concerns about the resurgence of JI is the potential return of Southeast Asian militants who fought in Iraq and Syria, which could provide JI with combat and weapons expertise and new leadership.[45]
