On the frontlines with the building of Al Queda forces in Indonesia both before and after 9/11, written in provocative style by the former Asia bureau chief for Newsweek International. In Allah's Torch, National Geographic's Tracy Dahlby takes readers into the sprawling, porous, virtually lawless domain of Indonesia, where overlapping lines of radical Islamic rage are now converging in Asia, posing new threats to Westerners at home and abroad. From the moment the adventure begins, the night the author blunders on board an Indonesian passenger ship with 600 Islamic warriors on an antiChristian jihad, readers glimpse the passions, politics and personalities fuelling radical Islam's relentless march. We listen as Koranthumping preachers, hardened holy warriors and freshfaced recruits, police investigators, military commandos, and spies try to make sense of the epidemic chaos that threatens the region and now the world beyond. Based on reporting both before and after September 11, Allah's Torch is an actionpacked and thoughtprovoking narrative that enables readers to see the face of Islamic terror more clearly and assess the threat for themselves.

A Note to Readers

xi

Prologue: Radical Mystery Tour

1

(10)

Part One

Holy War

11

(9)

Unbottled Lightning

20

(13)

Unhappy Campers

33

(17)

Mike

50

(12)

Murderers and Thieves

62

(9)

Paradise

71

(14)

Frogs

85

(11)

Original Sin

96

(12)

Escape

108

(17)

Part Two

Battle of Wills

125

(12)

Hidden Force

137

(13)

Fear Itself

150

(18)

Fatwa

168

(18)

Rizieq

186

(13)

Dead Men Walking

199

(12)

Lair

211

(11)

Terror High

222

(21)

The Mellow and the Brave

243

(13)

Wild Horses

256

(13)

Java Man

269

(14)

Epilogue: Jihad Everlasting

283

(6)

Acknowledgments

289

(2)

Chapter One

Holy War

May 11, 2000, 7 P.M.

The moon was shining over the harbor at Makassar, the storied old spice port nine hundred miles east of Jakarta, when Norman and I stood in the steamy night, staring up at the huge steel flanks of the interisland passenger liner the M.V. Bukit Siguntang. With its upper decks wrapped around a large single funnel, and bathed in a garish yellow light from intertwining floodlights, the vessel resembled a giant wedding cake from hell. Dozens of embarking passengers, shoving and yelling, and using their luggage as battering rams, fought for a foothold on the rickety gangway. Every now and then, pairs of gimlet-eyed cops in maroon berets and camouflage would yank some poor devil out of the mob, probe his deteriorating cardboard box with the snout of a machine gun, and haul him off into the shadows.

Alarmed by the chaos, I grabbed Norman by the arm, and said, "Remember, pal,we're here for a look -- but that is all. If anything, and I mean anything, seems dangerously out of whack, we're off the ship immediately. Comprendo?"

Norman nodded in agreement,but from the way his eyes dilated with excitement I could tell he wasn't really listening. In the next instant he raced ahead to the base of the gangway, waved for me to join him, and then suddenly disappeared into the levitating mob like a man being sucked up into the bowels of an alien spacecraft.

I froze. Without Norman I was absolutely and forever sunk -- just a confused, ignorant bule, or "white face," stranded on a dock in the middle of nowhere. And so I took a deep breath, walked forward on legs of concrete, and burrowed into the scrum. Halfway up the ramp a blunt object struck me square in the forehead -- thunk! -- and my skull rang like a brass bowl.When the ringing stopped, I was inside the belly of the ship.

It was dark and strange in there, the underpowered fluorescent tubes casting everything in a sickly greenish hue -- the long rows of wooden bunks, the surging crowd, the sea of oily bobbing heads. But when I finally managed to locate Norman in the mob and we reached the broad lobby outside the first-class cabins, there was something far more sinister to worry about. All around us now, hunkered down on dirty strips of cardboard or old pieces of straw matting, were large numbers of very unhappy-looking young men.

Mostly in their late teens or early twenties, and eerily silent to a man, they had the look of shipwreck survivors clinging to the wreckage. Those not rocking on their haunches, mumbling noiselessly over dog-eared copies of the Koran, stared fixedly into the middle distance. And unless I very badly missed my guess, I knew that we were staring into the face of a shadowy new Islamic terror brigade calling itself the Laskar Jihad, or Holy War Army.

I can't say we hadn't been forewarned. The Jihad's founder and spiritual leader, a man named Jaffar Umar Thalib, had vowed for weeks now to hurl his holy warriors at eastern Indonesia's far Molucca Islands, which happened to be our destination, too. Jaffar held the view, shared by many local Islamists, that a United Nations-sponsored independence referendum in predominantly Christian East Timor in 1999 had been part of an evil scheme hatched by then-president Bill Clinton (who was identified in militant propaganda as head of something called the "American Church") and his fellow capitalist cronies to break up Indonesia by creating a Christian republic in itsdistant watery gut.

It was to thwart that alleged plot that Jaffar had publicly proclaimed the establishment of the Jihad in January 2000 from his base in Central Java.And now, four months later, he boasted a strike force of ten thousand fighters, the largest of a small but dangerous constellation of radical Islamic organizations using reformasi freedoms jujitsu-style to undermine democratic society by raising private armies. Jaffar's call to adventure in defense of Islam was particularly popular with the alienated young men from Java's impoverished tobacco- and coffee-farming belts, and delicious paranoia made the glory of dying shahid -- a martyr for Islam -- all the sweeter.

In Jakarta, meanwhile, Jaffar's threats of holy way had duly alarmed President Abdurrahman Wahid, a moderate Muslim cleric and Indonesia's first democratically elected leader since 1955. But when Wahid sent an order for Jaffar's arrest through constitutional channels, to both his armed forces chief of staff and his civilian defense minister, he was promptly ignored. Indonesia's military didn't cotton to Wahid's reformist plans to curb its vast powers, and so in the great wormy can of Indonesian politics, the Laskar Jihad had become -- as an authoritative report published by the Brusselsbased International Crisis Group, later put it -- "the greatest symbol of the government's impotence."

Allah's Torch
A Report from Behind the Scenes in Asia's War on Terror. Copyright © by Tracy Dahlby. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Excerpted from Allah's Torch: A Report from Behind the Scenes in Asia's War on Terror by Tracy Dahlby
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