Word: basilan
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...year-old led the armed men, members of the feared Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group, to the resort, where they rounded up 20 hostages?17 Filipinos and 3 Americans?and transported them to their lair on Basilan Island in the far south of the archipelago. Upon arriving they seized 10 more hostages, mostly fishermen. Then the bloodbath began. At week's end, the group had been attacked by the Philippine military and lost up to 14 fighters, including supreme Abu Sayyaf leader Khadaffy Janjalani. They raised the stakes by storming a church and a hospital and taking 200 more captives? reports...
...Five days after the tourists were taken, Philippine soldiers in Basilan stumbled across the kidnappers as the hostages were taking a morning wash in a jungle river. It was the start of a small war. After the first firefight, 2 soldiers were killed and 14 wounded, while up to 12 guerrillas were left dead or injured. According to a source inside the group, the Abu Sayyaf held a meeting in mid- battle to decide whether they should start killing their captives. "Maybe we will stage an execution," Abu Sabaya told a local radio station via cell phone, adding: "Welcome...
...Checkpoint, a tin-roof shantytown next to the entrance to the former base, those young Catholic girls have had to grow up quickly. Melinda Basilan started working the strip stage at the Tahitian Queen when she was 16 years old. Now, she has two children. Stephanie is three, and her father is English. John Michael is two; his father is an American from Georgia. The Yank has promised to visit in May, but no one in the dirt alley is holding his breath. Checkpoint is filled with mothers waiting for fathers who never come back...
...tourists were now linked to a crisis in the southern Philippines. A month earlier, Abu Sayyaf fighters had kidnapped 53 people, including 22 children, from schools on Basilan Island, 50 miles northeast of Jolo. They demanded that the Philippine government persuade U.S. President Bill Clinton to release Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who is serving a life-plus-240-year sentence in Colorado. When Philippine President Joseph Estrada rejected the demand, the rebels announced that they had beheaded two hostages. Estrada ordered his military to launch an assault on the Abu Sayyaf camp...
...speed and solidarity that took the Philippine authorities by surprise, hundreds of hitherto law-abiding Moslems took to the hills. Since then, the hundreds have grown into thousands. Moslem insurgents are now estimated to number 13,500 in eastern Mindanao and 6,000 in the Sulu islands, chiefly Basilan and Jolo...