He was the maternal great-grandson of Tengku Cik di Tiro,[1] an Acehnese guerilla fighter and national hero of Indonesia who was killed fighting the Dutch in 1891.

Then a passionate advocate of identifying Aceh's history with Indonesia's nationalist struggle, he studied further in the Indonesian revolutionary capital, Yogyakarta, and authored two books in defence of this view.

While a student in New York City in 1953, he declared himself the "foreign minister" of the rebellious Darul Islam movement,[7] which in Aceh was led by Daud Bereueh.

Due to this action, he was immediately stripped of his Indonesian citizenship, causing him to be imprisoned for a few months on Ellis Island as an illegal alien.

[9] Di Tiro re-appeared in Aceh in 1974, where he applied for a pipeline contract in the new Mobil Oil gas plant to be built in Lhokseumawe area.

[10] It has been claimed that, as result of this loss and the death of his brother due to what he considered to be deliberate neglect by a doctor of Javanese ethnicity, di Tiro began organising a separatist movement using his old Darul Islam contacts.

Under the terms of the peace treaty, which were accepted by GAM's political leadership and endorsed by di Tiro, expanded autonomy was to be provided for Aceh.

As a consequence of previous strokes, he was too frail to deliver his own speech at his welcome rally and did not play any active role in Aceh's ongoing political process at the time.