Riduan Isamuddin

Riduan Isamuddin, also known by the nom de guerre Hambali (born as Encep Nurjaman; April 4, 1964), is the former military leader of the Indonesian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).

He is now in American custody at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba.

He is currently awaiting trial in a military commission.

Hambali was often described as "the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia".

Some media reports describe him as bin Laden's lieutenant for Southeast Asian operations.

Other reports describe him as an independent peer.

He was highly trusted by al-Qaeda and was the main link between the two organisations.

Hambali was a close friend of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned Operation Bojinka and the September 11 attacks.

Hambali envisioned creating a Muslim state, in the form of an Islamic superpower (a theocracy) across Southeast Asia, with himself as its leader (Caliph).

His ambition was to rule Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and parts of the Philippines, Myanmar, and Thailand.

He travelled to Afghanistan in 1983 to fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War.

During his three years as a mujahid, from 1987 to 1990, he met Osama bin Laden.

Friends and family in Indonesia say they did not know of his activities overseas.

His name has been transliterated into English text in several different ways over the years, including;

In 1991, Nurjamin returned to Cianjur for one week, before going to Malaysia, where he met the two co-founders of JI, Abdullah Sungkar and Abubakar Bashir.

The three lived in a housing compound in Kampung Sungai Manggis, Banting, Selangor.

Nurjaman internationalized the terrorist group's activities and took on a new name in his permanent residence permit: Riduan Isamuddin.

His nickname, Hambali, is an allusion to Hanbali, an Islamic school of jurisprudence.

The two co-founders sent their students to "study" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The students actually fought the Soviets until the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan.

A woman named Noralwizah Lee Abdullah had gone to Malaysia for religious schooling.

She secretly married Isamuddin after meeting him at the Luqmanul Hakiem School in Ulu Tiram, Johor.

The school was founded by Sungkar and Bashir.

Initially, Isamuddin struggled to make a living for his family.

He switched from selling kebabs to patenting medicines.

He soon disappeared from his home for weeks at a time, and he received many visitors at home.

He eventually came to own a red hatchback and several cell phones.

Investigators say that many calls on those cell phones were made to Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden's brother in law, who had arrived back in Manila, Philippines in 1991.

After Arab visitors gave his family much money, he founded a shell company, Konsojaya, in June 1994.

Ostensibly an import-export company trading in palm oil between Malaysia and Afghanistan, it was essentially a front company for terrorism.

Wali Khan Amin Shah, who would become the financier of Operation Bojinka, was a director of Konsojaya.

The company provided financial assistance to the project until it was discovered by investigators on a laptop computer after an apartment fire on January 6, 1995.

Shah was arrested in the Philippines but escaped on a short order.

He received increasing attention in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, in which 202 people died.

He was eventually apprehended in a joint operation by the CIA and Thai police in 2003.

He is currently imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, after three years of CIA custody in a secret location.

Riduan Isamuddin was born Encep Nurjaman in the rice belt of Sukamanah, a small village in Cianjur Regency, in the province of West Java, Indonesia.

He was the son of a peasant farmer, and was the second of thirteen children.

He first became involved with Jemaah Islamiah as a teenager.

He was a diligent student at his Islamic high school, Al-Ianah.