3. Understanding terrorism in Indonesia, with Noor Huda Ismail

Sub Rosa Podcast

For this episode, Andrew spoke to Noor Huda Ismail, an Indonesian author, film-maker, activist, and PhD candidate. Huda set up several non-government rehabilitation programs for terrorists released from jail in Indonesia, to help prevent them from becoming involved in violent extremism again. He's now based in Australia, studying the involvement of Indonesians with the "Islamic State" in Syria and Iraq. The episode begins by discussing Noor Huda's journey into this world. We talk about his teenage years in a boarding school in a central Java that was run by Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Baku Bashir. Sungkar and Bashir were members of an Indonesian jihadist movement called Darul Islam and would become the co-founders of the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). Several students in this school were recruited into JI, trained in Afghanistan, and later carried out bombings in Indonesia in the early 2000s. But Huda's life went in a very different direction. Huda explains how he felt compelled to help tackle terrorism in Indonesia. He was inspired by non-government efforts he saw working in Northern Ireland, and tried to set up similar programs in Indonesia. Not all of these worked, and he explains several of the successes and failures in this episode. We also talk about the evolution of terrorism in Indonesia, strengths and weaknesses of the state's counter-terrorism efforts, how the Syrian civil war and the rise of the "Islamic State" has changed the threat, and how he conducts research on this.