IIRO Funding Terror in Southeast Asia

By Zachary Abuza

That the IIRO had been funding terrorism in Southeast Asia since the early 1990s, is not news. What is news is that it took the US Government 12 years since it first became aware of its malfeasance when Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammad Jamal Khalifah was arrested in the United States, along with Loay Bayazid and a brother of Bin Laden in December 1994. Yet nothing was done despite damning evidence of what the IIRO was doing and who it was supporting in the Philippines. The kid gloves were on when it came to the Saudis.

Even in the Philippines, nothing was done, as Khalifah put the Saudi Ambassador to the Philippines on the board of directors, and he was never shy about closing the consular section the tens of thousands of Filipinos who sought work in the Kingdom. The IIRO was linked to Ramzi Yousef's plot to blow up 11 US jetliners, but still nothing was done to shut down the IIRO's activities.

The Treasury Department's press release noted the close ties that the IIRO had in funding the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG). What was conspicuously absent was any mention of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a group with much deeper ties to JI and Al Qaeda and one that took far more of the IIRO's funds.

The press release is interesting also in its vagueness about the Indonesian branch of the IIRO, which had a very small footprint in the country. Instead, the IIRO tended to partner with local charities, most notably KOMPAK, but others as well. KOMPAK was active in supporting JI and two of its affiliated paramilitaries, and several JI leaders/members worked for the organization during the worst period of sectarian bloodletting. A few people, such as Agus Dwikarna, were the heads of the local chapters of the IIRO and KOMPAK. Aris Munandar, whom the Treasury has already designated, was a senior IIRO and KOMPAK official. To date, KOMPAK has still not been designated. Omar al Farouq, the highest ranking Al Qaeda operative in Southeast Asia until his arrest in mid-2004 (he was one of the captives who escaped from US custody in Bagram) revealed that the IIRO was the primary source of Qaeda funding to Jemaah Islamiyah.

The last thing of note in the statement is that it described how in 2004 Abd al-Hamil Sulaiman al-Mujil invited a Philippines-based JI supporter to Saudi Arabia and provided him to cash to support terrorist operations. This confirms that Gulf financiers have really begun to rely on personal couriers to move significant amounts of funds in support of terrorism.

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