The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam (26 page)

Otherwise, Ibnu Ahmad was broke. This is where I came in. For the price of his plane ticket home, and the chance to see his wife and child, he was going to show me how he had grafted a war of worlds onto
this local conflict. He missed the days when he was a folk hero, when the difference between good and evil was glaringly clear, when identity and ideology were as simple as fear, a face mask, and the scrawl of a cross or a crescent on a wall. For the past two years, lack of funding and divisions over the meaning of jihad had been tearing Jemaah Islamiyah militants apart, and their beliefs and tactics
seemed to have lost favor among local people and prospective recruits. Several months before our trip, three Christian teenage girls had been beheaded on Sulawesi while walking to school; one’s head, wrapped in a black plastic bag, was dropped on the front step of a local church. A fourth teenager, Noviana Malewa, had also been attacked, but survived. No one had been arrested yet for these crimes,
but most thought the attackers must have come from among the hard-core fighters such as Ibnu Ahmad. Now the former heroes were pariahs.

On the flight to Sulawesi, Ibnu Ahmad listened to John Lennon’s “Imagine” over and over through a pair of flimsy earphones. “Al Jazeera,” he would joke from time to time, pointing to his cap. He liked to tease me
about the differences between our two worlds,
which he viewed as being in opposition: America and I and all Christians on one side, he and Al Jazeera and the world’s Muslims on the other. The conflict in Indonesia, however, was much more complicated. Every government arm that received counterterrorism funding from the international community—namely the United States and Australia—had a stake in the ongoing conflict. It was clear that the conflict
had little to do with religion per se and everything to do with competition over who controlled the local government and, by extension, the economy. These realities hadn’t occurred to Ibnu Ahmad, who clung to his worldview and the peace of mind it seemed to provide him, oblivious to the fact that the rest of his country, had moved beyond the jihad he thought he was fighting.

Ibnu Ahmad’s rabbits
were shivering but alive when they came out of baggage claim, their brown fur spiked like hedgehog quills. We were in Palu, Central Sulawesi’s main city; the dingy airport was full of scowling men in sunglasses and short-sleeve button-down shirts, the universal uniform of intelligence. Along with jungle rot and sea brine, menace hung in the moist air. Palu felt like a place of exile and disappearances.

Palu lies about sixty miles south of the equator, at almost the same latitude as Mogadishu, which is five thousand miles to the west, over the Indian Ocean. These are the fattest, lowest latitudes; the heart of Aristotle’s Torrid Zone. The soil was the color of saffron, as if egg yolk had been beaten into the ground. Here, as in Nigeria, tropical rainstorms had leached the gumbo of all minerals
but iron, and the ground was so vibrant it almost pulsed with what it could grow, which was why it was soaked in blood. By the paved road, farmers dried cloves on a blanket—the same cloves that had brought the Spanish and Portuguese to these islands five hundred years earlier. But cacao, which the Spanish brought from the Americas to Southeast Asia, was the real gold now.

Ibnu Ahmad had managed
to secure himself a small cacao field out behind the shack where his second wife, Farhia, had lived a few years earlier in the midst of the fighting. The night we arrived, Zamira Loebis and I went to meet her. Farhia’s broad face opened when she saw us. Then she returned to chasing the baby around the shack floor; he had begun to crawl since Ibnu Ahmad last saw him. Spying the rabbits, the baby
shrieked gleefully, grabbed a dinner plate, and dragged it along in one
small hand.
“Clinchi, clinchi,”
Ibnu Ahmad repeated the Indonesian word for “rabbit.” Reaching one rabbit, the baby took the edge of the plate and drove it into the fur between the animal’s skull and shoulders. He was trying to lop off its head with this makeshift ceramic guillotine. Ibnu Ahmad beamed. He planned to send this
son to a Jemaah Islamiyah school, where he would learn to fight as his father had.

Early the next morning, we hired a young driver in an old Land Cruiser to take us to Poso, Ibnu Ahmad’s former battleground. The road snaked southward along the coast; as we approached Poso, where most of the fighting had occurred, the conflict’s lines were disturbingly easy to see. The Muslims, mostly fishermen
and traders, lived by the sooty ocean; the Christians lived inland, where the island rose, like the spine of a sleeping creature, up a steep green ridge. The fighting had sharply segregated the two communities, reestablishing the colonial-era patterns of coastal Muslims ringing inland Christians.

With a stranger from Palu driving, we stopped to pick up a local guide, who would ride with us and
serve as negotiator in case anything went awry. An odd man, shrunken like a dried date and unable to stop talking, he crowed with a sycophant’s delight when he spied Ibnu Ahmad in the rear of the Land Cruiser. Ibnu Ahmad, it turned out, had commanded him on Sulawesi battlefields. “We all fought,” he shrugged. “Even the mayor was involved. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t.”

The man’s nom
de guerre was Hunter (others included Marlboro, Jet Li, and Osama). He was shrouded in a robe that looked like a maroon tablecloth, with a matching napkin on his head—a polyester costume that made him resemble an extra from a Bollywood remake of
Lawrence of Arabia.
“I prepared my outfit for men,” he said in defensive apology, his eyes falling on Loebis and me. The robe was meant to show his Yemeni
roots, though it was like no outfit I had ever seen in Yemen, or anywhere else. In the early days of Islam, many Muslim sailors, missionaries, and traders had come to Southeast Asia from the Hadhramaut in southern Yemen. Some present-day Hadhramis claimed descent from the Prophet; others, from Muslim traders from along the east coast of Africa. Osama bin Laden’s ancestors migrated to Arabia from
this bleak and rough region—a fact of which Hunter was especially proud, for it, like his robes,
suggested a distinguished Arab lineage, and his corresponding fantasy of authority.

We approached the charred remains of Sepe, a Christian village that Ibnu Ahmad had attacked in December 2000. The Christians were gone now, Hunter explained: they had fled, first selling their land to their enemies
at rock-bottom prices. (The Muslims who’d lived in predominantly Christian villages inland were forced to do the same.) Ibnu Ahmad remained silent in the back, earbuds plugged into his ears. The music was loud enough that John Lennon’s plaintive keen whined like a gnat in the car.

Mangroves had reclaimed most of the five hundred abandoned wooden houses. Relics of a massacre moldered among the
tree roots. A whitewashed wall painted with a blue cross read, “
Dani Jesus
,” or “Jesus Lives.” Next to it, someone had drawn a competing peace sign in green paint, and written “Islam” beneath it. The meaning was clear: Islam means peace. But there was no peace here. On one side of the road a steep hillside marked the beginning of what was now Christian territory; on the other, the Muslims’ wooden
shacks clustered along the edge of the pigeon gray sea. The two worlds met along the sandy road, where Muslims were beginning to rebuild. Up the ridge, in predominantly Christian communities, the pattern was happening in reverse. No one wanted to risk living among people who would turn against him the instant trouble started. Safety lay only in being a part of a larger whole, in numbers.

As we
drove the beachside road slowly in Sepe, the newly arrived Muslims looked up from their piles of lumber and stared into the car to see who was driving by. Hunter grinned and waved; he was proud to be seen with foreigners. Ibnu Ahmad slid down on his jump seat, seemingly ashamed of the havoc he had wreaked; so much for the conquering hero.

The engine idled, but no one got out of the car.

Ibnu
Ahmad reluctantly pulled the earbuds from his ears and pointed a stubby finger toward the overgrown hillside. This was part of our deal: he would map the battlefield for me. Now that we were here, he did not want to detail what he had done. In a monotone, he began, “On December 23, 2000, I came down that hill with twenty-five fighters I’d trained.” Our driver, who didn’t know him or his story, fell
quiet. “We went at nighttime and infiltrated. Sometimes it went wrong and we burned the wrong houses. It was easy to make mistakes and kill the wrong people.”

Fighting in this steaming, sleepy village was much more difficult than in Afghanistan, he reasoned. In Afghanistan, the Mujahideen stood at a distance from their Soviet enemies, who were dark blots against a snowy mountainside. Not here.
In this kind of jihad, the holy warrior saw the face of every man he killed. The victim would sweat and weep and plead his innocence, with his wife and children around the kitchen table, watching Ibnu Ahmad’s face for a flicker of mercy that never came.

“Muslims were being oppressed,” he argued against the air-conditioned silence. It was the Christians’ fault, he added vaguely. Plus, he and his
cadres had burned only a few houses. Within two years of that first attack, his colleague Omar Al-Faruq, an Al Qaeda operative, returned to burn the rest of the five hundred houses in Sepe. The goal of this bloodshed, Ibnu Ahmad tried to explain, had been to drive the Christians out of Sulawesi entirely, so as to establish a safe base—a
qoidah aminah
—from which his colleagues could rebuild the
perfect-seeming past of the seventh century.

“The first step of jihad” is what Ibnu Ahmad called this
qoidah aminah
. “It’s what the Prophet established in Medina.” He had learned this during the eighties, in Afghanistan, from the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam.
Qoidah
is the Indonesian word for “base”; in Arabic, it’s
qaeda
.

As a safe base, Sulawesi offered a perfect staging ground for
a holy guerrilla war, Ibnu Ahmad said. (Later, his former commander Nasir Abbas—a Jemaah Islamiyah leader who trained fighters in the nearby jungles of the Philippines, and who defected from the group after his arrest in April 2003—confirmed this account to me.) JI’s plan was to forge the nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, and the southern Philippines, into one Islamic megastate,
using extraordinary acts of violence, such as the Christmas Eve church bombing in 2000 and then the Bali bombings. Sulawesi’s long, gentle coastline provided ideal ground for landing boats in secret; its high verdant ridges, like their bleaker equivalent along the Afghan border, formed a perfect natural defense; and revenue from the booming chocolate market would soon fill their coffers, as Abbas,
the reformed commander who planned this strategy, told me. Chocolate would be a source of terrorist funding, like opium in Afghanistan or diamonds in West Africa. But the plan didn’t come off. The beheading of the three schoolgirls turned locals, Christian and Muslim alike, against the radical outsiders from JI, a shift in his status that Ibnu Ahmad was still struggling to comprehend.

During
the long, sticky hours in the car, Ibnu Ahmad fell into a reverie for the good old days in Afghanistan. He seemed to find it easier to imagine himself as a hero there, wounded by Soviet shrapnel, than to recognize himself as a killer in Sepe. Mostly we compared notes about the craggy border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and discussed the war he had “won” against the Soviets. “I miss it sometimes.
It’s a way to heaven.” (Fittingly, he also liked the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven.”) There he had learned the radical Islamic teaching that a martyr bypasses the judgment of God, and that jihad is the shortcut—or escalator—to heaven.

Yet Ibnu Ahmad was disappointed in the direction the holy war had taken in Indonesia. JI had run short of cash: “When Hambali was here, there was plenty
of money; now there’s none,” Ibnu Ahmad said. Hundreds of militants had been arrested, including Ibnu Ahmad. Ideological divisions were also ripping the group apart, especially the question of whether holy war allowed the killing of civilians. Although no one in JI liked to admit it, their bombings generally killed innocent bystanders: fellow Muslims, not enemies of Islam.

Ibnu Ahmad opposed
the killing of fellow Muslims as a way of spreading radical Islam. In theory, he was intent on returning to the seventh-century way of life, dress, and devotion practiced by the Salafs, the first three generations of the Prophet’s followers. Many Salafis, like Ibnu Ahmad, abhorred what was happening to contemporary jihad, because they believed these current struggles were political—not religious.
For instance, fighting against the Indonesian government—fellow Muslims—was not religious, it was political, he argued. “Salafis don’t get involved in politics,” Ibnu Ahmad said. Jihad did not condone killing fellow Muslims. True Salafis, he believed, did not even use prayer mats when they knelt and faced Mecca, since these were a post-seventh-century innovation. The concept of what it meant to be
a Salafi was splintering fast, between Salafi jihadis who employed unconditional violence and those who opposed such violence on the grounds that there was no supreme leader—no caliph—to sanction it.

Within his family, these rifts were emerging. Ibnu Ahmad’s little brother Salahuddin, thirty, had been arrested on terrorism charges about a week before we left for Sulawesi, and Ibnu Ahmad was in
anguish. Salahuddin’s view was that anyone who did not espouse all-out war in the name of Islam was a kafir, an unbeliever, and every unbeliever must be killed. To Salahuddin, Ibnu Ahmad was such a kafir. Salahuddin now swore
allegiance to a new leader, Noordin Top, the Malaysian-born head of a JI splinter group who espoused this ideology; Ibnu Ahmad called Top “a psychopath.”

“Kill, kill, kill—he’s
destroying Indonesia,” he said.

That afternoon we drove to Hunter’s house for tea to be beyond prying eyes. Ibnu Ahmad could go almost nowhere on the island. Locals feared him; his fellow fighters knew that he had informed on them during his arrest and torture.

Hunter lived a hundred yards from the lapping waves of a small harbor. He had recently completed a second story on his wooden house—a
large, empty veranda where he liked to nap in the afternoon with the sea stretching before him to the equator’s hazy band. On the way, Ibnu Ahmad confessed one thing he hated about Afghanistan: the arrogance of the Arab fighters, who believed, by virtue of their Arab ethnicity, they were better Muslims than locals and Southeast Asian foreigners, including the Indonesians. “The Arabs were
zolim
,” he said, which means “cruel” in Arabic. “They smoked, chased women, and ate unclean food,” he said. “Arabs are the wickedest people on earth.”