How Southeast Asia’s hardline groups saw September 11 attacks

Groups like Jemaah Islamiyah were already carrying out attacks in Southeast Asia when 9/11 happened – an attack of an altogether larger scale.

Medan, Indonesia –  Ali Imron, one of the perpetrators of the deadly bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002, says the first he saw of the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, was on the front page of his local newspaper. “Our family didn’t have a television at the time,” Imron told Al Jazeera. The 52-year-old was sentenced to life in prison for his role in planning the Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, many of them foreign tourists. “But I immediately guessed this was ‘jihad’ from our friends.” Twenty years ago, Imron was a member of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a hardline group founded in 1993 in Indonesia, which still counts more than 1,600 active members according to the Indonesian authorities. JI has historically been linked to al-Qaeda, which claimed responsibility for September 11 and was headed by Osama bin Laden.