WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com - The United States on Thursday officially branded Islamist firebrand Abu Bakar Bashir’s Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid group as a foreign terrorist organization, tying it to several attacks in Indonesia.
The three-year-old group was behind a Java church bombing last September, deadly attacks on Indonesia policemen and bank robberies aimed at raising money for weapons and bomb materials, the State Department said.
“JAT seeks to establish an Islamic caliphate in Indonesia, and has carried out numerous attacks on Indonesian government personnel and civilians in order to achieve this goal,” it said in a statement. In parallel the US Treasury announced that it was placing sanctions on three leading members of the group, banning US citizens and businesses from any transactions with them.
The three were JAT acting emir Mochammad Achwan, spokesman Son Hadi bin Muhadjir, and recruiter and fundraiser Abdul Rosyid Ridho Ba’asyir. The US “is taking another step to ensure that terrorists are cut off from the international financial system and find it ever more difficult to carry out their acts of violence, no matter where they are based,” said Adam Szubin, director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The move boosts pressure on the network of 73-year-old Bashir, who was sentenced to prison last year on charges of funding terrorist activities. Bashir was the alleged founder and chief ideologue of the better-known violent group Jemaah Islamiya, responsible for a string of attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
Bashir founded JAT in 2008 as an allegedly legitimate group to help Muslims and promote Islamic law. But Indonesian police have said that JAT is merely a front for a new campaign of attacks.
