Jihad Sheilas - As viewed on ABC TV and online

This blog has been setup in responce to the TV News programme shown on Australian TV, ABC entitled " Jihad Sheilas". Feel free to post your comments, but please keep it clean, and try not to be reactionary, but rather construtive comments would be welcome.

Link to One of the stories here

PICTURE the sitting room of a modest two-bedroom flat at Lakemba in southwest Sydney.

Neatly covered floor cushions lean up against the wall beside a shelf full of brass ornaments from the Middle East, while a tank of goldfish bubbles in the corner.

It doesn't look like a terrorist's lair.

The occupant is a 54-year-old mother of six and grandmother of two, retired and living on a disability pension.

She doesn't look like a terrorist.

But this is the most-watched woman in Australia, monitored for the past 20 years by ASIO and described by intelligence analysts as the "matriarch" of radical Islam in Australia. Rabiah Hutchinson snorts with laughter at the description. "They've got it wrong. I am not important. I'm just a 54-year-old granny with diabetes and arthritis. What are they so worried about?"

Ms Hutchinson has been closely watched by Australian authorities since October 2003, when she returned to Australia from Iran, where she had spent nearly two years in hiding after fleeing from Afghanistan amid the US bombing raids that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US. Her passport was subsequently cancelled, based on advice from ASIO to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade that she was "likely to engage in conduct that might prejudice the security of Australia or of a foreign country (and) endanger the health and physical safety of others".

Ms Hutchinson remains barred from travelling overseas, believes she is under constant ASIO surveillance and claims her family and friends are continually harassed.

After years of silence, she has decided to speak out to deny any involvement in terrorism and accuse the authorities of persecuting her and her family.

"It's not just me they're targeting. Now it's my children and even my grandchildren," Ms Hutchinson says. "It's absolutely ridiculous - to think I had any personal knowledge of or contact with Sheik Osama bin Laden. I am absolutely nobody. I just happened to be there."

As she recounts her life story, Ms Hutchinson laughs, sometimes shouts and occasionally weeps - at the memory of friends killed by US bombs in Afghanistan, or the hardship endured by her children because of her activities.

She is passionate, funny and articulate, a natural story-teller and eloquent advocate of her faith. Born of Scottish stock and raised in Mudgee, in central NSW, she is also very Australian, describing in a broad Aussie accent how she carried Vegemite on all her travels, even to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

She is certainly extreme - in her absolute and unwavering devotion to Islam. And she is also angry.

"When we left Afghanistan, we became among those classified as the most hated people on the face of this planet," Ms Hutchinson says. "And being one of those people means that there are a lot of people on this planet who believe you have less rights than an animal, that you can be tortured, raped, maimed, renditioned and have the most horrific things done to you in the name of anti-terrorism."

Rabiah Hutchinson has been of interest to Australian intelligence since the 1980s, when she was living in Indonesia and joined the rising Islamic resistance movement opposed to the Suharto regime.

She had arrived in Indonesia as a 19-year-old backpacker visiting Bali in the early 1970s. There she converted to Islam and married an Indonesian man, with whom she had three children. When they divorced, she returned to Australia, but later went back to Indonesia to study Islam, which she says transformed her life.

"I have been a cook, a cleaner, a teacher, a doctor. I've been as poor as a beggar on the street. But it doesn't matter because if you have Islam, it all has meaning. If you take Islam out, it has no meaning."

She became a follower of the Indonesian clerics Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, who at the time were becoming known as dissidents for their resistance to the Suharto regime. They had been imprisoned by Suharto in the late 1970s for plotting to overthrow the Indonesian government, and were deemed to be "prisoners of conscience" by Amnesty International.

Much later, in the 1990s, the pair would form the militant group Jemaah Islamiah, whose members would carry out terrorist attacks such as the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Ms Hutchinson says she opposes terrorism.

"In all the years I've been a Muslim I have never sat in a lesson where they have said, 'OK, we have to organise in a group, get weapons and go out and start killing people who oppose us'. I've never heard of it. It's got nothing to do with Islam."

In 1984, Ms Hutchinson married Indonesian engineering student Abdul Rahim Ayub in a ceremony at Bashir and Sungkar's Ngruki Islamic boarding school in Solo, Central Java.

The newlyweds returned to Australia, where Ayub was appointed the "emir" or leader of JI's Australian branch, Mantiqi 4.

At the time, JI's raison d'etre was campaigning for an Islamic state in Indonesia. It had yet to resort to terrorism, and the role of the Australian branch was principally to raise funds.

Mr Ayub left Australia in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombings and has not been directly implicated in terrorist activity.

Ms Hutchinson says: "The only function that (those) people served in Australia was to raise and donate money to support (the group's) projects in Malaysia. Maybe he was the 'emir', but if hewas, then it was just collecting money."

After five years of marriage, Ms Hutchinson divorced Mr Ayub in 1989, and took off to realise her long-held ambition to join the global jihad.

She travelled with her six children to Pakistan to join the mujaheddin forces who had just defeated the Soviet army in neighbouring Afghanistan and were fighting to oust the Moscow-installed Najibullah regime in Kabul.

"It was the best place I've ever been in my life," Ms Hutchinson recalls. "It was the closest thing to the implementation of Islam to the fullest extent.

"It was a place that consisted only of people who had gone there for the same reason - because they wanted to live under Islamic law and spend their lives pleasing Allah and to bring up their children according to the Koran and Sunnah (customs) of the Prophet."

Ms Hutchinson spent four years working in a mujaheddin hospital and orphanage in a dusty encampment on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

"We had no electricity. There was cholera and typhoid, and mosquitoes so big they would carry you off in the night. And the dust. But it didn't matter, because we thought that after all this hardship, Afghanistan would become an Islamic country and we'd all go and live there happily every after."

After returning to Australia and living for a time in Egypt, in 2000 Ms Hutchinson travelled to Afghanistan, by then under Taliban rule, accompanied by four of her children. She established a health clinic in Kabul, worked in the women's hospital and was involved in projects such as building wells and promoting English-language skills among Afghan doctors.

She says she became known to the Taliban leadership because of her work. "I was a rarity for the fact that I was a woman alone and had taken my children there. It was something unusual, that a woman would go to such lengths to live under an Islamic state. Andalso the fact that I was treating people. I was known because of that."

Ms Hutchinson became so well trusted that in 2001 she was asked by bin Laden's deputy and chief adviser, the Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahari, to run a new women's hospital in Kandahar. The project never eventuated because of the September 11 attacks and the US retaliation.

Ms Hutchinson says she was against the project because it was designed to cater for the foreign volunteers who were fighting in Afghanistan, rather than for the Afghan people, whom she believed were more in need of help.

"The majority of people we knew weren't al-Qa'ida - whatever 'al-Qa'ida' is supposed to be. They weren't opposed to it, but they weren't necessarily a part of it. They were just people who had gone to live in an Islamic state. Would they have fought? Most definitely; fought to hang on to what they had achieved. And anyone who was willing to fight was immediately labelled 'al-Qa'ida'."

While living in Kabul, Ms Hutchinson married a veteran of the jihad against the Soviets, the Egyptian-born Mustafa Hamid, also known as Abu Walid al-Masri, who was a leading Islamist ideologue and military strategist. Hamid was working as the Kandahar bureau chief of the Qatar-based Arabic television network al-Jazeera.

Mr Hamid was a close associate of Taliban leader Mullah Mohamed Omar and of a number of senior al-Qa'ida leaders, including another Egyptian, Mohammed Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, who was bin Laden's military chief until he was killed in a US bombing raid after September 11.

Mr Hamid parted ways with bin Laden after the September 11 attacks, which he believed were a strategic disaster, and became an outspoken opponent of al-Qa'ida.

"What I know about Abu Walid, he was never ever a member of al-Qa'ida," Ms Hutchinson says. "He didn't approve of al-Qa'ida. He disagreed with them - on everything, their methodology, their goals, everything."

Ms Hutchinson has since separated from Mr Hamid, who is believed to be in prison in Iran.

As US cluster bombs rained down on Afghanistan in late 2001, Ms Hutchinson and her children fled across the border to Iran, where they stayed in hiding until October 2003, when ASIO agents tracked them down and flew them under armed guard back to Australia. While Ms Hutchinson has remained in Lakemba, unable to leave Australia, in 2004 her sons Abdullah Mustafa and Mohamed Ilyas, then aged 19 and 17, travelled to Yemen to study Islamic law.

In November 2006 the two young men were detained with a group of foreigners in Yemen and accused of being part of an al-Qa'ida cell involved in gun-running to Somalia. Ms Hutchinson says she believes they were arrested on the basis of information provided by Australia to the Yemeni secret police.

"The Yemenis were laughing. They said to my boys, 'What's this about your mother?' My son said, 'They think my mother is a big al-Qa'ida terrorist'. They laughed and said, 'Are they afraid of women in your country?"'

After seven weeks in detention, the two young men were released without charge. They later told of having been held in solitary confinement in disgusting conditions, being blindfolded, threatened and beaten. They were deported from Yemen and moved to Lebanon, but were recently forced to leave that country for Dubai after the Lebanese authorities refused to renew their visas.

"My sons are not allowed to exist. They are not allowed to live anywhere on this earth," Ms Hutchinson says. "Why? Just because I'm their mother?

"We just want somewhere to live, somewhere where we can be normal and live according to Allah's laws. It's not that we want to take over the world and make everyone a Muslim, or stop anyone wearing a bikini on Bondi beach."

Two of Ms Hutchinson's children live in Australia while her two younger daughters are in the Middle East. Ms Hutchinson said she preferred to keep them out of the story. Ms Hutchinson says she feels like a prisoner in her Lakemba flat, which she avoids leaving except when necessary. She occasionally holds classes on Islamic law and practice for young Muslim women, who she says immediately become targets of ASIO.

"I have to say to these girls you know that coming to my place means you'll be on ASIO's list. You may be visited, your husband may be visited at his place of work, your phone calls will be monitored."

ASIO continues to regard her as a threat to national security, stating in a security assessment: "Rabiah Mariam Hutchinson has extensive links to and supports the activities of Islamic extremists both in Australia and abroad. Hutchinson is directly associated with core members of the Ahel al Sunna wal Jamaah Association, with senior members of both Jemaah Islamiah and al-Qa'ida, and has directly supported extremist activity."

Ms Hutchinson scoffs at the suggestion that she poses a threat. She says the so-called "war on terror" is a war on Islam, and that she and her family are among its casualties.

"You know what's so intolerable? The lies. If they've decided we're not allowed to exist, then at least be honest about it. If they've decided we must be exterminated, don't lie about it. Don't make up all these slogans like the 'war on terror'. Just say, 'We don't like them and we're going to wipe them off the face of this earth'."

Sally Neighbour is a senior reporter with The Australian and the ABC's Four Corners. She is writing a book on the life of Rabiah Hutchinson