Exposing the face of the shadowy Jemaah Islamiah
From 1948 to the early 1960s when its back was broken, Darul Islam was the group that Muslim radicals would join to pursue a dream of Indonesia as an Islamic state.
When President Suharto fell in May 1998, the advent of free speech and assembly and the activities of some enterprising military intelligence operatives helped nurture new groups.
Thus thousands of eager young Muslim men went to fight Christian compatriots in the Maluku Islands from early 1999.
In time-honoured fashion, true believers pursued their cause, corrupt security forces profited and the world largely ignored the destruction of hundreds of communities and thousands of lives in a little-known religious war.
That neglect, and the incompetence of investigations into bombings across the country in 1999 and 2000, has come back to haunt not just Indonesia but the region as a whole.
Behind the scenes, a far more ambitious plan was afoot - the cross-border marriage of religious fanaticism with battle-hardened explosives skills in the resurrected cause of an Islamic caliphate across Southeast Asia.
This is Jemaah Islamiah, says the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think-tank which has just produced a second report on the roots of Islamic rebellion in Southeast Asia through analysis of trial documents, police reports and its own interviews with an impressive range of contacts.
The report includes a detailed breakdown of the personalities and actions which now appear to be behind not only the Bali tragedy but, if the results of interrogations can be trusted, the spate of 38 bomb attacks across Indonesia on Christmas Eve, 2000. The jury remains out on whether this new wave of militancy is linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda in any practical way, beyond an apparently shared vision of the world and a willingness to kill innocents.
But the new focus on acts of terror, particularly the Indonesian-led but Western-backed probe of the Bali bombing, is bringing the shadowy Jemaah Islamiah into view.
As in any revolutionary movement, there are splits over ideology, leadership and tactics. The late Abdullah Sungkar is the guru for younger radicals led by Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali and listed by the US as Southeast Asia's 'most wanted man'. He and others now associated with many bombings across Indonesia believe their group must operate in secret, and must have nothing to do with any legal system or state that is not wholly 'Islamic'.
By contrast, the now imprisoned Abu Bakar Bashir, anointed as Jemaah Islamiah's leader when Sungkar died, has used the non-Islamic legal system to the extent of lodging lawsuits against the Singapore government and Time magazine.
Colleagues of Bashir have registered above-ground groups such as Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia - forbidden behaviour which could contaminate the faithful, say Sungkar's radicals.
This divergence surfaced again over the Bali bombings, the crisis group says, when Bashir argued the time was not ripe, as co-operation between the US and Indonesian governments could combine to destroy Jemaah Islamiah. The young radicals went ahead, killing almost 200 people in Bali on October 12, but Bashir's view might prove prescient too.
Just as fascinating to analysts as where the militant network came from, is the identity of allies on specific attacks. A detailed outline of how the bombs went off in Medan on Christmas Eve 2000 suggests the involvement, or at least acquiescence, of military intelligence men.
It also highlights the significance of long-established regional trade and transport links, along which illegal arms and people exchanges take place between Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.
