Word: mindanao
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Poor and lawless, the southern Philippine region of Mindanao has for decades hosted criminal gangs engaging in everything from gunrunning to extortion to kidnapping. It has also 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...
...Mindanao's Islamic rebels now seem to be after more than a home alone. TIME has learned that elements of these same separatist movements have become a nexus for Southeast Asian terrorists and are providing a training ground for 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...
...That Mindanao seems to be morphing from being mainly a separatist issue for the Philippines into a terrorist problem for the rest of Southeast Asia has Malaysian and Indonesian officials on full alert. (Both countries have porous maritime borders with Mindanao.) Over recent weeks, Malaysian police have detained six suspects in the town of Sandakan in Borneo for arranging the transport of JI recruits to Mindanao. Meanwhile, Indonesian police say that several of the 18 men arrested for plotting and executing the Dec. 5 bombing of a McDonald's outlet in Makassar in South Sulawesi province have confessed to being...
...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...
...best to stop the terrorist attacks? National Police Superintendent Robert Delfin is surprisingly optimistic. "No matter the extent of their network, we can monitor them. We know the personalities." Parouk Hussin, Governor of the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, is less sanguine. "Personalities may come and go," he warns. "The idea's harder to kill." By Nelly Sindayen/Manila...