Photo credit Frederic Weber—By Gigi Marino
By the age of 18, Indonesian-born Mohammad Nasir bin Abbas was studying the strategy of terrorism and refining his weapons skills at the so-called "Mujahidin Military Academy in Afghanistan. By his early 20s, bin Abbas had been recruited by the newly formed Jemmah Islamiyah (JI), a radical Islamic organization operating from Southeast Asia. Achieving a key leadership role, he was placed in charge of a training unit that included territories in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Bin Abbas holds strong opinions and values. He believes in Sharia, the strict Islamic law that advocates dismemberment for theft and stoning for adultery. He trained the JI militants responsible for the Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people in 2002. And yet, he himself did not participate in those bombings, having already become disillusioned with JI because of its willingness to strike at civilian targets.
In fact, since then, Nasir bin Abbas has become an outspoken critic of Jemmah Islamiyah’s fanatical militantism. He is a member of an informal and iconoclastic community of ex-terrorists—once violent individuals who no longer participate in extremist activities. His story and the stories of others like him, says John Horgan, provide valuable lessons for the study of terrorism.
Horgan is director of Penn State’s International Center for the Study of Terrorism (ICST). His latest book, Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements, published by Routledge Press in May, examines case studies from several former terrorists as a framework for understanding the complex connective tissue that binds people to terrorist organizations and the circumstances that inspire them to leave.
