Word: mindanao
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...half hour ferry ride southeast of Cebu city, and Nuts Huts, a three-hour drive inland from the port, is truly in the middle of nowhere. That's perfect for travelers who have overdosed on Spanish churches, major tourist attractions and diving in the Mindanao Sea. Visitors with more energy to expend can always jump on a mountain bike, go caving or see the thundering Tontonan Falls. As for us, we rarely got vertical in the four days we were there. E-mail walterken@hotmail.com for reservations...
...Bush famously vowed, will take many years and span the globe. Already it has put American troops in harm's way in Afghanistan?and now the southern Philippines, where last week an American MH-47 Chinook helicopter went down in the shark-infested waters between southern Negros and northern Mindanao after ferrying soldiers and supplies to fight on the small island of Basilan. As of last weekend, three crew members' bodies had been recovered and seven more were unaccounted for. That this second front in the war on terror has turned costly was to be expected. The U.S. is helping...
...small community of Simuay Crossing on the Philippines' southern island of Mindanao, Mohammad Sabri Selamah fit in just fine. He spoke three local dialects, had lived in Mindanao for almost a decade and was raising four kids with his Philippine Muslim wife. Selamah, a Palestinian carrying Iraqi travel documents, worked as the head teacher at a Koranic recitation center attached to a local orphanage. Datu Tucao Mastura, mayor of the nearby municipality of Sultaan Kudarat, says, "There was never any suggestion he was doing anything except his work at the school...
...Manila's generals have known for years that the MILF is the real challenge in the region. It has a couple of hundred guerrillas on Basilan, compared to the 80 hard-core stragglers that now make up Abu Sayyaf. And on the island of Mindanao, the vast heartland of the southern Philippines, it has up to 12,000. Its dedication to carving out an Islamic state from the predominantly Catholic Philippines is real. (Abu Sayyaf traded that ambition for lucre years ago.) It's got guns, training camps, an ideology?and, it now appears, more current and substantial links...
...Most importantly, Arroyo is in peace talks with the MILF, hoping to avoid a much larger conflict in Mindanao. That requires Manila?and now Washington?to deliberately ignore the MILF's very dark side. It has trained Pakistani, Arab and Indonesian jihadis. Rohan Gunaratna of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University in Scotland estimates that 400 to 600 foreigners have passed through its camps since 1996. Its links to Jemaah Islamiah are evidenced by the tale of Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, an Indonesian arrested in January in Manila for taking part...