JAKARTA: Captured in Thailand in August 2003 during the height of the United States-led war on terror, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, has spent more than two decades in detention.
South-East Asia’s most infamous terrorist figure was shuttled through CIA “black sites” before his 2006 transfer to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where, more than 22 years after his capture, he still awaits trial.
The December 2024 repatriation of his two Malaysian codefendants, Mohammed Farik Amin and Mohammed Nazir Lep, has left Hambali as the last South-East Asian detainee at Guantanamo Bay.
The Malaysian duo pleaded guilty for their roles in the Oct. 12, 2002 Bali bombings. Yet rather than signaling that Hambali’s case was nearing resolution, this has only sharpened the question of whether it ever will.
His case is no longer simply about one man’s alleged role in terrorism. Instead, it reflects shifting US foreign policy priorities under President Donald Trump and the declining relevance of the war on terror in Washington’s strategic thinking.
Recruited by Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) cofounder Abdullah Sungkar, Hambali rose within the militant organisation amid the expansion of transnational terrorist networks following the Soviet-Afghan War.
Like many militants of his generation, Hambali traveled to Afghanistan during the 1980s, training at the Sada Camp run by Afghan militant leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
The Afghan conflict became a critical networking hub for militants worldwide, allowing South-East Asians to forge ties with Arab jihadists, including figures linked to al-Qaeda.
When Hambali returned to Malaysia, he played a crucial part in JI’s regional expansion, eventually rising to become its operational commander and the head of its shura (advisory) council, according to his profile on the United Nations Security Council website.
He also led JI’s Mantiqi 1, the division overseeing Malaysia and Singapore. More importantly, he evolved into al-Qaeda’s primary liaison in South-East Asia, facilitating funding, logistics, training and operational coordination between local terrorist cells and al-Qaeda’s senior leadership.
This role transformed Hambali into one of the most dangerous terrorist operatives in Asia. Unlike many ideologues within JI, he believed strongly in direct militant action, becoming a leading figure within the group’s “pro-bomb” faction and advocating large-scale attacks against Western and regional targets, The Diplomat reported.
Hambali’s capture represented a major counterterrorism victory. His subsequent detention, however, became emblematic of the legal and ethical controversies that came to define Guantanamo Bay.
Following his arrest, Hambali was held in several CIA black sites, where he was subjected to what was described as torture in a 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report. He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
Though ostensibly sent there for trial, his first formal court appearance did not occur until 15 years later, in August 2021. Since then, the case has remained mired in pretrial proceedings, with proposed trial dates repeatedly floated and missed.
His codefendants’ repatriation in December 2024 underscored the unresolved legacy of the war on terror in Asia.
Hambali is scheduled to reappear before the Guantanamo military commission for another round of pretrial hearings on Nov. 16-20. The proceedings are expected to address outstanding motions and evidentiary issues linked to his prosecution over the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2003 Jakarta JW Marriott Hotel attack.
The repeated failure to bring Hambali to justice reflects not merely bureaucratic delay but a deeper transformation in what Guantanamo is for, and who in Washington still cares about it.
When Trump returned to office in January 2025, he signed executive orders not to close Guantanamo, as his predecessors had attempted, but to expand it. His administration announced plans to use the facility to detain tens of thousands of migrants and undocumented immigrants, repositioning Guantanamo as an instrument of domestic immigration enforcement rather than of international counterterrorism.
The shift has meant further marginalisation of the original war on terror detainees. The military commissions that were designed to try them were already slow and legally contested, according to the Center for Victims of Torture; now they compete for institutional attention and resources with an administration focused on an entirely different set of security priorities.
The message is that prosecuting aging terrorists from a two-decade-old conflict is not a pressing concern in Washington today. Critics argue that this represents a profound institutional failure.
The victims of the 2002 Bali bombings and the 2003 Jakarta hotel blast and their families have waited more than two decades for accountability. Instead, they have watched as the political appetite for that accountability gradually evaporated on both sides of the Pacific.
The legal situation is further complicated by the fact that even if Hambali were to be repatriated, he could not be tried in Indonesia, where the statute of limitations for the charges against him had expired, Reuters reported in January 2025.
Jakarta, which for years denied Hambali was an Indonesian citizen, has reversed course in recent years, acknowledging his nationality and expressing concern for his welfare as a citizen detained abroad. But the domestic legal pathway that might have offered an alternative route to justice is now closed.
Coordinating law minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra has acknowledged this bind, noting that Hambali remains subject to US military law. Repatriation, he says, would require complex interministerial coordination and remains a low priority.
The result is a man caught between a US military commission that has spent years failing to try him and a home country that is legally unable to do so.
Although JI announced its dissolution in 2024, Hambali’s case continues to matter, not only as an issue of justice but also as an analytical lens on the longer arc of the war on terror.
His career illustrates the degree to which South-East Asian militancy in the early 2000s was not a purely domestic phenomenon. Hambali moved across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Pakistan and the Philippines, exploiting weak borders, ideological networks and the operational infrastructure of al-Qaeda’s global ambitions.
His activities helped catalyse the regional counterterrorism architecture that Asean subsequently built: one that, whatever its limitations, has proven durable. But his case also illustrates the limits of that architecture’s American anchor.
Guantanamo was premised on the idea that some enemies were too dangerous for ordinary law and too valuable to release. Decades on, the legal framework built around that ground has failed to deliver accountability.
Hambali remains at Guantanamo Bay; the families of the Bali bombing victims remain without a verdict.
And the US, now preoccupied with the war on Iran and other uses for its most controversial detention facility, has yet to explain what it intends to do about either. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
Jasminder Singh is an associate research fellow with the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, where Muhammad Garda Ramadhito is an associate research fellow with the Indonesia Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies.
