Jakarta – South-east Asian militants are divided over the wisdom of attacking hotels, nightclubs and other "soft targets" where Muslims may be killed alongside Westerners – an internal split which could weaken the terrorist enterprise, the authorities said.
Some militants inside the Al-Qaeda-linked regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI) want their jihad, or holy war, to focus on fighting Christians in certain regions of Indonesia rather than bombing Western targets where Muslims die too, according to government officials, defence attorneys and an intelligence adviser to Indonesia.
The debate among Indonesian militants appears to have intensified after the August 5 bombing of the JW Marriott in Jakarta – whose 12 fatalities were mostly Muslim. A prominent group of Muslim defence lawyers told AP they would not accept any Marriott bombers as clients.
After the Marriott bombing, several senior militants close to Zulkarnaen, JI's purported operations chief, expressed displeasure because most the victims were Muslim, said the senior intelligence adviser who asked not to be named.
He said the information was based on internal JI communications picked up by Indonesian intelligence agents.
The revelations about the rift coincide with a post-Sept 11 hobbling of Al-Qaeda's and JI's structures that many officials believe has led to more indiscriminate targeting – not just in Indonesia, but around the globe – moving away from Al-Qaeda's tradition of limiting attacks to Western and Jewish targets.
Dissension inside militant ranks could weaken terrorist networks anywhere in the world, officials said, though it may also mean greater danger as cells attack without the blessings of their peers.
In fact, officials in Indonesia, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they are bracing themselves for more attacks, which they say are increasingly likely, especially during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Indonesia's national security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned in a speech on Sunday in Bali that terrorists appear to be "regrouping, reconnecting, recruiting and retraining".
JI – whose professed goal is to impose an Islamic superstate spanning much of South-east Asia – is loosely organised with an estimated 3,000 members in the region, including 2,000 in Indonesia.
Several senior JI operatives were not privy to either the Marriott bombing or the October 12, 2002 twin nightclub attacks on Bali island which killed 202 people, officials said, underscoring the diffuse nature of the group and its ability to act without consensus.
Most of the Bali blasts' victims were vacationing foreigners, with only a few Muslims, mostly waiters and other workers, among the dead. That is because Bali, unlike the rest of Indonesia, is primarily Hindu and because the Sari Club, the worst-hit of the two nightclubs, had a controversial policy of only admitting foreigners.
All this helps explain why the Marriott attack led to far more soul-searching among militants than the Bali blasts.
Ismail, a key suspect in the Marriott bombing, on Tuesday said he regretted carrying out the attack because of the high number of Indonesian victims.
Increased Muslim deaths are a by-product of successful blows against Al-Qaeda's command structure, communications and finances as terrorists resort to local targets, said a US counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity from Washington. He predicted that these killings may create a backlash in the Islamic world.
Attorney Mahendradatta, leader of the Muslim Lawyers Group which has defended most of the Bali bombers, said some of his clients believe the war should be limited to places where Muslims have been attacked by Christians – such as Indonesia's Sulawesi and Maluku regions. Others, he said, think all of Indonesia is fair game "because Indonesia is not yet an Islamic state".