Word: milf
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...provided a haven for insurgent groups seeking to establish Islamic or communist states. Hardly a week goes by without a firefight, a bomb attack or a snatching. Just last Tuesday, the Philippine military unleashed yet another full-scale offensive near the town of Pikit against Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) militants, resulting in the deaths of at least 160 guerrillas and eight soldiers, and prompting the exodus of some 40,000 civilians...
...operatives linked to Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist network widely blamed for last October's deadly Bali bombings. Officially, the army says it launched last week's operation to pursue a kidnap-for-ransom gang (called the Pentagon) that was being given sanctuary by the MILF. Another goal was to disperse a concentration of 1,000 MILF fighters on the edge of the Liguasan marshes, an expanse of waterways and islands that make up one of the group's few remaining strongholds. Philippine and Western military-intelligence sources are asserting, however, that in the past three months...
...camps and the Bali bomb plot. "Mindanao is where the Bali bombers tried to get weapons for other operations," says a member of the investigative team, who adds that documents found in the possession of Bali suspects listed serial numbers for weapons that were known to belong to the MILF. "For JI, Malaysia and Singapore are used primarily for financing and the Philippines for training. Indonesia is where they put everything into practice...
...Indonesian, Malaysian and even Arab extremists have previously been known to take refuge in Mindanao. For example, both Agus Dwikarna and Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, two prominent Indonesian militants currently under arrest in Manila for possession of explosives, did stints in Mindanao in the late 1990s. The MILF willingly provided training facilities to foreign fighters, but in the days following the war to oust the Soviets in Afghanistan, the group's hospitality was motivated more by international Islamist solidarity than by anti-Western jihad. In 2000, the Philippine military overran all of the MILF's bases?including its two biggest...
...Mindanao again proving so hospitable to foreign terrorists? The short answer is that the Philippine government is divided over how to tackle the MILF. Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and the army favor a military solution. But while operations like last week's take place periodically, Manila is simultaneously pursuing negotiations with the MILF leadership. For fear of derailing these talks?and despite additional pressure from the U.S., which has about 300 troops stationed in the Philippines to train the country's military in counterterrorism techniques?President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo refuses to have the MILF designated a terrorist group...