Word: basilian
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Going after al Qaeda in the Philippines will be even more difficult than hunting the terrorists in Afghanistan. The 650 U.S. soldiers who have been deployed on the southern island of Basilian to help the Philippine armed forces rout the fighters of a radical Islamist group known as Abu Sayyaf are stepping onto sometimes treacherous turf. That much was made clear Wednesday in neighboring Jolo province, where three Marines of the Philippine army were killed in a firefight - by Philippine police. (The guilty policemen were former guerrillas of the Moro National Liberation Front, a Muslim secessionist group that had been...
...Sayyaf was founded in 1991 by Abdurajak Janjalani, who returned to his native Basilian after a spell in Afghanistan, where he'd gone to join the anti-Soviet jihad. Janjalani's militant group was funded by front organizations linked with al Qaeda, and had hosted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef during his stay in the Philippines. Yousef, who had trained with Janjalani in a camp at Khost, hoped to use Abu Sayyaf operatives to attack U.S. airliners in the Philippines. The Filipino organization's longstanding affection for the Pakistani terrorist is reflected in the fact that they typically...
...wider political context in the southern Philippines may pose problems. The MNLF, of course, is today the ruling party in Basilian, and five other regions that have joined the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao since the peace agreement of 1996. This week's firefight between police and soldiers appears related to a faction fight between rival factions of the MNLF - the imprisoned Misauri had launched his rebellion only after being voted out of office by his own party, and his support-base remains limited...
...global jihad last October, emphasizing that its primary concern was to bring peace to the southern Philippines. So the tiny Abu Sayyaf is essentially alone, and could potentially be finished off even within the six months allocated for the initial joint exercise between U.S. and Philippine military personnel on Basilian...
...group, which has boasted of links with Osama bin Laden, only a month ago seized some 50 students from schools on the island of Basilian and demanded that Manila secure the release by Washington of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and other convicted terrorists held in U.S. prisons. In this instance, they're assumed to want money, and the Philippines government isn't interested in paying. But the multinational makeup of the hostages has raised the pressure on Manila to do whatever it can to avoid bloodshed. With no solution in sight a week after the latest hostage drama...