It took 25-year-old Wardini and her two young children almost two months to travel with smugglers by road from Jordan, through Iran, to western Afghanistan. By the time they were arrested by Afghan border guards, she had burned their Indonesian passports. They were not going home, she told an Indonesian consular officer who visited her in a Kabul prison in 2019. With the end of days near, she and her children, both then under three, would live in “Khorasan, the blessed land”, she said.
Khorasan, a historical region that once spanned much of central Asia, including Afghanistan, and parts of Iran and Pakistan, is where some Muslims believe an army will rise to inflict a major defeat against their enemies; it is, according to a hadith, or religious saying, often cited by jihadis, where Armageddon begins. Osama bin Laden issued al-Qaeda’s first declaration of war against the United States in 1996 with the dateline, “Hindu Kush, Khorasan, Afghanistan”. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Isis) announced its expansion to “Khorasan” in 2015, and as it started losing territory in the Levant, began relocating some of its key operatives to Afghanistan to kick-start its ambition to take over all of Central and South Asia.
Over the last three years, a question that has greatly exercised national security specialists is this: where will Isis establish its next global headquarters following its ousting from Syria and Iraq? My colleague Colin P. Clarke, commenting on this question in February 2018, wrote: “Historically, terrorist and insurgent groups tend to establish roots in weak states plagued by persistent civil conflict, sectarian tension and government inability to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.”
Along with Libya and several regions in Africa, Afghanistan is on most lists for the next Isis safe haven. Has the central Asian country moved higher up the list now that the US has announced a complete troop pull-out by September 11 this year, the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the US that were planned by al-Qaeda on Afghan soil?
IS-Khorasan is, however, only one of the several armed non-state actors in Afghanistan. When it ruled over much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban welcomed armed groups comprising what the United Nations now calls foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). These groups never left Afghanistan through two decades of fighting.
The key question therefore is how many FTFs will flock to Afghanistan once US and Nato forces leave for good? Will they make use of Taliban hospitality to train new generations of terrorists to conduct attacks at home, and against anyone they deem to be enemies?
The lure of Afghanistan
The Indonesians enticed by Isis’ promise of an Islamic utopia in their lifetime began setting up a pipeline to Afghanistan in the waning days of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq. By early 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down international travel, at least a dozen Indonesians had already attempted to migrate to Afghanistan. Apart from Wardini and her children, two other women, one with a young daughter, and two men, have been detained in Kabul since 2019 on suspicion of attempting to join IS-Khorasan. Several other Indonesians are believed to have slipped the security net and joined the group.
The phenomenon of the Southeast Asian foreign fighter did not start with Isis. Southeast Asian extremists have been part of the international mujahideen network since the US and Saudi-funded campaign to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan after the 1979 invasion became the first conflict in recent history to attract thousands of Muslim foreign fighters to a Muslim country under the banner of a jihad.
Back then, the leaders of Darul Islam, an Indonesian rebel movement, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the southern Philippines saw the Afghan conflict and the military training being offered to volunteers fighting the Soviets as a good opportunity to ramp up their own organisational capabilities in weapons and explosives handling, guerilla warfare and religious indoctrination. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is believed to have sent hundreds of its members to the Afghan Mujahideen Military Academy beginning in 1980. Darul Islam, according to the records its splinter faction Jemaah Islamiah kept, followed with 197 Indonesians between 1985 and 1992. The first Malaysians went on their own; while studying in Pakistan, dozens crossed the border to join the mujahideen in the 1980s.
Driven as much by organisational goals as by religious fervour and individual purpose, Southeast Asian extremists were very selective in the foreign conflicts they fought in. A few Malaysians and Indonesians were spotted during the Bosnian war, and a few Filipinos working in the Gulf were said to have fought against American forces in Iraq.
But Southeast Asian extremists rarely went out of the region. This might be because by the mid-1990s, Southeast Asia was providing its own conflict zones – Ambon, Poso and Mindanao – for home-grown jihadis to prove themselves and for al-Qaeda to send in foreign fighters and trainers. Those who missed the Afghan conflict did find another opportunity to go there, albeit for shorter terms.
Fashioning itself as a pan-regional terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiah selected 100 of its most promising Indonesian, Singaporean and Malaysian recruits for training in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 1998. Many came home to plan and participate in terrorist attacks in the region, including the Christmas Eve bombings of churches across Indonesia in 2000, and the suicide bombings of nightspots in Bali almost 20 years ago.
Although the Southeast Asians who were dispatched to Afghanistan went to be trained for jihad at home, the fighting was for many of them also the best time of their lives. Even the poster boys of Indonesia’s counter-radicalisation efforts proudly identify themselves as former mujahideen.
Both former Jemaah Islamiah trainer Nasir Abas and Ali Imron, one of the Bali bombers serving a jail sentence, begin their memoirs with accounts of studying at the Afghanistan Mujahideen Military Academy. Their eyes light up when they talk about fighting alongside the Afghan mujahideen during “study holidays”, even as they renounce the use of terrorist violence in Indonesia.
Syria changed the game; it was simultaneously about building a religious utopia and indulging in your most base instincts – there are no rules in fighting an apocalyptic war against all infidels.
For the first time, Southeast Asian women and children joined the caravan. At least one quarter of the 1,870 from Southeast Asia who sought to go to Syria after the civil war began in 2011 were female. Of the 1,000 who made it to Syria, about 200 women, and 80 children under the age of 10 are now in the refugee camps in Syria.
For the first time, too, Southeast Asians took part in suicide bombing attacks in a foreign conflict. By one count, about 20 Southeast Asians became suicide bombers in Syria and Iraq, including some 13 Malaysians, the country’s first suicide terrorists.
Two forces now drive foreign fighters. Like al-Qaeda before it, Isis also tells its followers that it is wrong to live in a non-Muslim country, or any land not ruled by sharia (Islamic law), and they therefore have a duty to migrate to live with “jihadis” who live like the pioneers of Islam. By holding territory in Syria, Isis could claim to be building a state run purely along Islamic principles. This it did as the first order of business of its propaganda machinery. It also urged women to join it to raise what it called Cubs of the Caliphate, thus making women responsible for the success of its state-building project.
The Isis propaganda has also been greatly facilitated by sophisticated use of the internet and communications technology. In the past, an aspiring jihadi in Southeast Asia had to be invited to join a terrorist group and most of them believed women belonged only at home. Social media is, however, an equal opportunity instigator. Now anyone with a smartphone and a wifi connection can imagine herself to be part of a community of violent actors, and act on its beliefs.
For those who buy into the Isis state-building narrative, an Afghanistan no longer propped up by the West represents another opportunity to make the virtual caliphate real again. The modern Afghan state might be able to hold onto the cities – so long as there is external financial assistance for its security institutions – while the Taliban controls much of the countryside even as it battles other local warlords and armed groups, including IS-Khorasan.
For the extremists in Southeast Asia who dream of emulating the “Afghan veterans”, this too is an opportunity to gain some combat experience while learning new tradecraft and becoming part of an international network of foreign fighters.
A war-weary world that decides to look the other way, or worse, allow neighbouring states to strengthen their own proxies, might not have to wait years to feel the repercussions.