Paving a new path for the children of terror

THE first impression of the diminutive woman in the back seat of the car is that of a giggly young girl. Flanked by two young daughters, her eyes crinkle behind her glasses. A narrow strip across her eyes is the only exposed part of her face.

Clad in the niqab, the garb of the zealous Islamic Salafists, she is almost inscrutable.

I am meeting Titin, 39-year-old Indonesian wife of Mubarok, alias Utomo Pamungkas, one of the terrorists jailed for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Titin has never spoken to a foreigner before. Meeting the wife of a jihadi isn't easy; permission is first required from her husband, who is serving a life sentence in the Metro Jaya Detention Centre in Central Jakarta. Engaging with foreigners is against jihadic principles, rendering terrorists' wives and children largely an enigma.

Titin agrees to meet on the condition family friend, supporter and former hardliner turned Indonesian counter-terror expert, Noor Huda Ishmail, joins us.

Huda and Mubarok were classmates and "close buddies" at the Al-Mukmin Ngruki Islamic boarding school in Solo, Central Java, the Ivy League for recruits to Jemaah Islamiah according to the International Crisis Group.

Their first radicalising influence, the school's founder, cleric and jailed terrorist Abu Bakar

Bashir, also taught Bali bombers Ali Ghufron, aka Mukhlas, and his brother, Ali Imron.

A former Washington Post correspondent, Huda once aspired to fight as a mujahid (holy warrior) in Afghanistan against Soviet forces but chose a different path, which inspired his book Temanku, Teroris? (My Friend, The Terrorist?), published last year.

The book is the basis for a compelling documentary, Prison and Paradise, made with Indonesian filmmaker Daniel Rudi Haryanto, to be screened at the Gold Coast Film Festival in November.

Featuring interviews with the Bali bombers in jail between 2003 and 2007, their families - including Titin and their victims, the film examines the mindset of the terrorists and the legacy they have left their children.

Haryanto interviewed Imam Samudra, Mukhlas and Amrozi, all executed in 2008 for their roles in the 2002 bombing. A shared belief in the nearly 14 hours of interviews was that they would go to paradise. "They [jihadists] all said they wanted to go to Heaven where there would be 72 beautiful virgins ready at all times to serve them and give them sexual pleasure," Haryanto says. "They claimed to be fighters in the way of Allah, and they believed their reward would be paradise."

You won't hear this in the film: Haryanto edited it out, fearing it might spark contentious debate about the meaning of jihad.

"I wanted to focus on the impact terrorism has on women and children," he says.

On that he has succeeded. There's no doubt the Bali bombers - in their nihilistic pursuit of violent jihad - ensured the disintegration of their families long before their deaths or imprisonment.

In an effort to understand the influence terrorists have on their children, Inquirer also sought to interview Ali Imron's wife, Nissa, but discovered she and her two children had retreated to the furtive world of a radical Islamic compound in East Java. Huda fears for the children's future.

Meanwhile, Titin and her daughters, Asma, 11, and Qonita, 9, sit in the brightly lit Dunkin' Donuts in bustling Yogyakarta, Central Java. No one raises an eyebrow at the fully veiled woman and her daughters. It's a surreal situation: here is the radical Muslim family of an infamous terrorist enjoying the incongruous setting of an American fast-food outlet, the type that attracts "infidels" and incites deadly attacks.

Indeed, Titin appears indifferent to her environment. Settling down to afternoon tea, she guides it beneath a flap covering the lower part of her face. She only started wearing the niqab after Mubarok's arrest in 2003.

Titin has not told her daughters of their father's jihadic background, or why he is in prison in solitary confinement. When the girls visit him, every six months, she pretends he is living at a university: "They know only that their father is studying at a school for adults. I think they are too young to understand the truth."

Neither will she divulge the truth in the future, "unless they ask". "I'm afraid if they know it will damage them psychologically," she says. "Sometimes it makes me cry when the younger one asks 'Why doesn't my father want to come home'?"

In the mysterious world of jihadists' wives, it's unknown to what extent children are indoctrinated. "It's like a secretive sect," says Huda. But authorities warn children are vulnerable to radicalisation, particularly as husbands dictate all aspects of family life, even from prison.

Says Seto Mulyadi, chairman of the advisory board of Indonesia's Commission of Child Protection: "These children are being brainwashed, and gradually they will become a threat to society. [They] are influenced by their fathers' jihad doctrine and beliefs from a very early age.

"Without prompt intervention programs these children will quickly lose their basic children's rights and will easily be influenced by the Islam radical groups."

Titin maintains her daughters are typical kids. "I don't know what will happen in the future but I don't want them to follow a radical path."

The sisters' extreme Islamic dress portrays a different picture. It follows they will eventually wear the niqab - equated with radical Islam in Indonesia - though Titin says she won't enforce it.

Despite the rhetoric, Huda shares the view children are potential high risks. Putting it into context, Mubarok, who continues to make family decisions, told Huda for his book: "I was part of an underground movement organisation, the Jemaah Islamiah. Jihad is the path of my struggle, to die shaheed [as a witness] is my goal."

Titin stands by her man, claiming he had an indirect role in the bombing. Mubarok's bank account was used to transfer money to fund the Kuta bombings. He helped send explosives to Bali and drove a van used in one of the blasts to the island. An Afghan war veteran trained in the southern Philippines, he and most of the other Bali bombers taught religion at the Islamic boarding school in East Java founded by Mukhlas.

Asked if she is committed to jihadi principles, Titin prevaricates. Recently she was approached to teach at a radical Islamic boarding school and enrol her children. JI persistently tries to recruit the family, and Titin claims it's a constant battle avoiding its clutches.

Hard-core charities aligned to Islamic networks typically offer financial aid to struggling families whose main source of income has been severed.

Enter Huda, the avuncular, surrogate father to the children, who is trying to break the cycle by providing financial independence through a small enterprise. It's one of his deradicalisation programs for wives of terrorists which operates through his Jakarta-based International Institute for Peace Building. Titin's children, who attend an Islamic public school, deemed moderate by extreme Muslims, are enough of a risk for Huda to donate money for a secular education "to save two children from being recruited".

Despite graduating from Surabaya University, East Java, with an English degree, Titin sells children's clothes in a remote village 40km from Yogyakarta where the family lives with Mubarok's father, who is deeply disappointed in his son. Isolated and scorned, the girls are taunted and Titin cannot get a job. Neither does she see the wives of the Bali bombers, apart from Ali Imron's wife during prison visits. Mubarok and Ali Imron have expressed remorse over the bombing.

Wives typically purport to know nothing of their husbands' activities. Hard-core Islamic doctrine allows men to leave families indefinitely without explanation. When Mubarok left for three months to prepare for the Bali bombing he just said, "I have to go away for a while."

Nine years down the track, the climate of terror is as virulent as ever. There is no shortage of fresh-faced radical recruits in Indonesia, Islam's most populous nation.

What of the progeny of the Bali bombers and other terrorists? Will they be hell-bent on retribution for growing up without fathers, some of whom are serving life in prison or have been executed?

It was at a government high school in east Java that Titin sampled her first taste of radical Islam. Proving indoctrination is rampant, even in secular schools, her school teacher, connected to JI, arranged her marriage to Mubarok. Two and a half years later he was arrested. Nearly a decade on she still professes to love him: "There is only one in my life, I am still in love with him."

Apart from the scores of innocent victims Mubarak left in the wake of the blast, his own daughters will never know him. Does he regret that? "He never expresses anything, but I can see he is sad," says Titin. "One time he wrote me a letter saying he almost cries to see his children growing up without him." Of the bombing, he says simply: "I made a mistake and this is the big lesson for me in my life."

Titin says she only discovered Mubarok was involved after police released his name on TV three months after the bombing. "He said he had to go away. I did not ask why. I started to make a connection when I saw Amrozi [Mukhlas's younger brother] arrested on TV. My husband and Amrozi were very close friends." What Amrozi lacked in brains Samudra made up for, says Huda. "He had the best rhetoric, he was clever and technologically savvy, but Mukhlas was the leader. He was charismatic with a deep religious understanding."

Mukhlas's widow, Paridah Abas, 41, who lives in Malaysia with the couple's six children aged between eight and 20, agreed to an email interview. She too denies her husband was a terrorist, despite the fact he confessed to being operations chief of JI, that he had ordered and planned the 2002 Bali bombings, and had ties to Osama bin Laden. He admitted to recruiting two of his brothers, Amrozi and Ali Imron, to help assemble and transport the bombs used in the attacks.

Paridah, who has worn the niqab since she was 19, describes her husband as a mujahid, a perception shared by the couple's six children. "My children see their father as a mujahid, someone who fought for Islam in Afghanistan.

"As for the Bali bombing, we still believe that he is innocent, that he was not the planner-bomber, whatever the government accused him to be. My children see him as . . . a very good father, a genius in Islamic studies."

When Mukhlas was executed in 2008, Paridah stayed at her mother-in-law's house in East Java. "[I was] surrounded by his big family and my eldest son was with me. I read [the] Koran."

A kindergarten teacher, she denies her children, who attend a public school and study Islamic knowledge, are motivated by violent jihad, or that JI has approached them, but "as Muslims, they do believe they should live in an Islamic state. We are grateful we're living in Malaysia." Malaysia's dual legal system allows Muslims to live under a diluted version of sharia law.

Asked if the family was subjected to discrimination she brushes off the question: "Alhamdulillah [praise to God], [we] have never been treated like that. I believe my husband's good image and his way with the community help us a lot."

On the outskirts of east Jakarta in a squalid housing compound, Rahmat, 44, slices up chickens to sell locally, constituting a meagre income. Radicalised by a desire to live in an Islamic state, and by his teacher Bashir, the former JI member was trained in Afghanistan by his friend Mukhlas in 1987.

Rahmat was rounded up with eight others and arrested in the aftermath of the Bali bombing in 2003. He spent 10 days in jail.

"I still believe in violent jihad if there are threats to Muslims," Rahmat says. "If something happened in [the Christian-Muslim conflict zone] Poso again, it would be a trigger."

His wife Suryati also claims she knew nothing of Rahmat's radicalism. "Whatever he does is the right thing," she says. "I was shocked when he was arrested."

Highlighting the threat of radical Islam to a new generation, Suryati says of their 13-year-old daughter: "The older child knows of her father's background. She was five when he was arrested and now understands and is supportive. She shares his radical views because she goes to an Islamic boarding school. She is proud of her father's dedication to radical Islam."

The family of four children is included in a University of Indonesia program, run by psychologist Sarlito Wirawan Sarwono under the auspices of a Muslim orphanage in Jakarta that supports high-risk children of ex-terrorists.

"Most fathers are out of prison. Many are ex-terrorists who did not go to court because of a lack of evidence," Sarlito says. While 32 children are supported by the orphanage, some live at home. Acknowledging the massive scale of the problem and a shortage of funds, he admits many kids fall outside the safety net.

Indonesia's Ministry of Social Affairs is embarking on an initiative this year involving about 300 children of terrorists "to cut off the network".

"If you let them go, they will do the same as their fathers. They are not yet involved in radical activities, they are still too young," says Makmur Sunusi, director-general for social services and rehabilitation at the Indonesian Ministry of Social Affairs. "If we don't intervene they will fall. They will have their own mindset about government, state, life. We want to correct the ideology back to the right one."

Under the scheme, children will be removed from known extremist hotbeds, compounds or enclaves housing terrorist families, to undergo therapy. "Later, when they are back to normal, we return the children," Sunusi says.

International Institute for Peace Building research director Taufik Andrie describes how poor families of terrorists are targeted by jihadists and Islamic boarding schools.

"The pesantren [boarding school] offers a sanctuary, the wife is given free food and education for her children." In return the wife is forced to teach children radical Islam, "the way the father got the same education".

For instance, Andrie says, Samudra's wife teaches at the Ulil Albab Islamic boarding school in Solo, central Java, where her four children, raised on a radical diet, will perhaps one day replicate a violent cycle. Mothers usually perpetuate the myth police or the government were to blame for the fathers' imprisonment or death. "The [families] consider themselves victims. Every terrorist is a hero to the children. Jihad is considered holy, a good deed."

The institute has conducted a business initiative trial for 10 wives of imprisoned terrorists in Surabaya but, fearing the money may fund radical networks, it has been discontinued.

The institute also researched radicalisation in jails last year with terror expert Carl Ungerer, whose recent report said jihadists were operating shadow governments from Indonesian prisons and planning attacks in the outside world.

"The government has released 250 terrorist inmates since 2000 without a single [rehabilitation] program; 17 are recidivists," says Andrie. He fears numbers will rise as more than 100 inmates are released on probation next year.

Terrorism in Indonesia is a backlash from the repressive Suharto regime, which propagated a secular state and religious pluralism. Limited religious practice and an expensive, secular education system were the catalyst. "That's when the Islamic boarding schools sprang up," Andrie says.

In a south Kuta home, not far from Bali's ground zero, Eka Laksmi, wearing a hijab, shows me a photo taken in 2001 of her husband Imawan Sardjono and their two sons, Alif, then three, and Aldi, not even two. A year later her firefighter husband, aged just 33, was blown away as he sat in a traffic jam in Kuta's tourist precinct outside the Sari Club on his way home. Eka's life fell apart.

"I was angry, depressed, hopeless. There was no income, no job." The religious irony is not lost on Eka, whose husband also taught children the Koran. She herself now teaches at an Islamic school. The bombers, who had targeted "infidels", brushed off Muslim victims as collateral damage.

"I started to study my religion more. The jihad [bombing] wasn't jihad, it was evil. I thought 'they can't believe in the same god as I do'," says Eka, who suffered post-traumatic stress as her sons became uncontrollable. Gaining strength from her religion, she started wearing a veil in 2006.

"I am a proud Muslim. I have taught the children this is not what our religion teaches us. If you want to heal you must forgive, and anger is not going to bring back your father." She believes her sons will not seek retribution. Of the terrorists' wives and widows, she says: "They've been made victims by their husbands." As for the children, "they're still pure".

From 44 terrorists shot dead since 2003, about 38 have families, most likely harbouring animosity. As Andrie says, how do we know how the sons of Samudra or Mukhlas, both about 11, will turn out?

"I haven't seen any research yet that says the sons will be the next terrorists but the elder son of Samudra is very terror-related. How about in the next 10 years, after his family have educated him with the legacy of his father?" he says chillingly. And will Mukhlas's eight-year-old son live up to his namesake, Usama?