Word: jolo
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...With help from the U.S. military, they have focused on eliminating Abu Sayyaf leaders, embedding national troops and U.S. advisers in areas the group once regarded as its own, and winning local support with community projects. "The group has disintegrated," says Brigadier General Juancho Sabban, the Jolo-based head of Task Force Comet, the Philippines' counterterrorism effort. He believes Abu Sayyaf, which once boasted more than 1,000 men under arms, now numbers at most 250 fighters who dare not move around in groups of more than a dozen. Hard-core membership, Sabban says, has shrunk...
...demonstrate the improving security situation on Jolo, Sabban takes visitors to his forward operating base in the former terrorist stronghold of Tugas, northwest of Jolo town. Accompanied by more than 50 soldiers in jeeps and armored vehicles, his convoy rumbles through small villages. Not long ago, the base's access road was a dirt track where Abu Sayyaf fighters came and went freely, using the dense rainforest as a retreat or as cover for ambushes; the main road through this part of the island was known as the Boulevard of Death. Now the road to the base is lined with...
...push it more, maybe we can finally eliminate it." Abu Sayyaf members are now said to be so cash-strapped they have turned again to kidnapping civilians for ransom. In January, suspected Abu Sayyaf gunmen killed a priest during a botched kidnapping on Tawi Tawi Island, not far from Jolo. On June 8 Ces Drilon, a well-known local TV-news anchor, vanished with her cameraman and an assistant near Jolo in what appears to be another Abu Sayyaf abduction...
...When the funding starts to dry up, they start to get desperate," says Colonel Bill Coultrup, the Jolo-based commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force, which provides military assistance, training and intelligence assistance to Philippine forces. Coultrup's 500 men, who include Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, are spread throughout the Philippines. Inside a nondescript, windowless building at the task force's Jolo Island base, a half-dozen soldiers are studying laptops. A large screen on the wall shows the video feed from an unmanned drone cruising over potential Abu Sayyaf hideouts in the jungle...
...Philippines was a Spanish colony. Indeed, U.S. troops were first sent to the southern provinces over a century ago to subdue rebellious Moro tribespeople. "You can see civilians working well with the military and supporting [its civic] projects," says Yusop Jikiri, a congressman for Sulu, the province of which Jolo is the capital. "But what happened in the past is still in their hearts. Deep inside, they look at the military as their enemy." Civilian casualties during army ops, not an uncommon occurrence, also undermine public confidence in the authorities. The most recent example was a botched military raid...