I just read a BBC article about Nasir Abbas, former member of Jemaah Islamiya and trainer of jihadis in the southern Philippines. The article discusses his role in Jemaah Islamiya, and how the killing of over two hundred civilians in Bali in 2002 pushed him away from the organization. He is now an informant for police in Indonesia.
The key step in his path away from contemporary jihadi, from the article:
"I train people for war, for battle," he said. "We are killing for defence. We are fighting for our right. And we are not attacking civilians but soldiers."
Innocent lives
According to Mr Abbas' philosophy of jihad, it is acceptable to fight and kill foreign forces occupying Muslim countries like the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Americans in Iraq or the Philippine army occupying ancestral Muslim lands in Mindanao, but killing innocent civilians - men, women and children - is forbidden.
This is the philosophy of modern violent jihad outlined by Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, acknowledged to be the "father" of modern violent jihad.
With this distinction in mind, the 2002 Bali bombings in which 202 civilians died, made Mr Abbas think again about the organisation to which he had belonged for almost a decade.
When he discovered that his former students, whom he had trained in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, were responsible, he was deeply shocked.
"I feel sorry, I feel sin," he said, "because they used the knowledge to kill civilians, to kill innocent people."
Notably, when he was taken into custody, the Indonesian police surprised him by treating him with respect, whereas he'd been expecting torture.