KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 26 — Finding themselves in a foreign land, Malaysian and Indonesian jihadists under the Islamic State (IS) have banded together in a Malay-speaking military unit according to a recent report on the militant group denounced by both countries.
Analysts fear the unit, which now has at least 22 fighters, will be the jumping point towards the spread of IS’ ideologies and fighting force back home in Southeast Asia, adding to its growing claim of a caliphate.
After meeting in the town of Al-Shadadi, Hasaka province in early August, the group is now planning to expand it to a katibah, a military unit of 100 men roughly equivalent to a company, the report said.
“A Malay-speaking unit makes sense militarily, because language was a perennial problem. Most Indonesians are not fluent in English or Arabic, and those assigned to Arabic-speaking units were often at a loss.
“Members of the katibah could become the vanguard for a fighting force that would reach into Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines,” said the latest report from the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), called “The Evolution of ISIS in Indonesia”.
This comes after Malaysian police intelligence warned last month that Malaysians who joined the IS to launch strikes in Iraq and Syria, are now training their sights on their home government and several other targets in the country.
The police said the group was planning to establish a hardline Southeast Asian Islamic caliphate which would include Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore; which IPAC named as “Daulah Islamiyah Nusantara”.
IPAC also pointed out that before IS declared the formation of a caliphate, there were few Malaysians in IS, as most of them joined instead the Ajnad al-Sham Islamic Union based in and around Damascus.
Ajnad al-Sham is an alliance of several Islamist militant groups, and it opposes both the Syrian armed forces and IS.
It is believed that the three Malaysians recently slain in Syrian fighting this past two months were fighting under Ajnad al-Sham.
One of the jihadists killed, Mohd Lotfi Ariffin, was a former member of Islamist party PAS.
The political party had acknowledged the Kedah-born’s battles abroad and called him a “martyr”.
The IPAC report also said that the connection between Malaysia and Indonesia started off with supporters of IS from both countries “friending” each other on Facebook.
Indonesian IS fighters have also posed as Malaysians for security reason, in the same way Malaysians and Indonesians posed as Filipinos when they went to Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Both Malaysians and Indonesians also leave for the Middle East using each other’s countries in order to throw trackers off their scent.
“There is so much travel between the two countries that it would raise no flags with immigration authorities on either side,” said IPAC.
In a separate report by Singapore daily Straits Times (ST), head of Indonesia’s National Counter-Terrorism Agency Ansyaad Mbai said the unit “share similar beliefs and goals” with regional terror group Jemaah Islamiah (JI).
Like the unit, JI also aimed to formed an Islamic state in the Southeast Asian region, and was responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed over 200 civilians.
However, unlike the JI Southeast Asian cell based in Karachi, Pakistan, these IS fighters have direct battle experience unlike the former which only travelled occasionally to Afghanistan, IPAC director Sidney Jones told ST.
“The cross-regional bonds established could also be the strongest we’ve seen in a long time,” added Jones.
“This group was formed with a goal to recruit and facilitate people who want to go to Syria to defend the Islamic caliphate, and also do counter-attacks against governments that repress caliphate supporters,” said analyst Robi Sugara of the Barometer Institute in ST.
Putrajaya has previously designated the IS, formerly known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, as a terrorist group.
After officially condemning IS last month, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak reiterated his stand in New York today, saying the self-proclaimed jihadists did not represent true Muslims.
