Word: sayyaf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sayyaf has always said it is fighting for an independent Islamic nation in the southern Philippines, but during the late 1990s, the movement began to show cracks, and members started behaving more like a gang of well-armed bandits driven by greed, not creed. Since about 2002, however, the extremist group has been reverting to its original separatist goals, and its bombings and assassination attempts have increased accordingly...
...early 1990s, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law funneled money into Abu Sayyaf through a fake Islamic charity in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf, which means "barrier of the sword," carried out its first attack in 1991, killing two American evangelists with grenades on the southern island of Mindanao. As the 1990s unfolded, the group's body count in Mindanao steadily rose. In 1994 the Philippine army blamed Abu Sayyaf for a series of bombings in the Philippine city of Zamboanga that killed 71. The following year, Abu Sayyaf raided the town of Ipil, leaving 53 dead...
...When Abdurajak's younger brother Khadaffy Janjalani took complete control of the group sometime around 2002, Abu Sayyaf renewed its ideological fervor for independence and refocused its efforts on bombmaking. In 2004 the group took responsibility for the most deadly terrorist attack in the history of the Philippines: the 2004 bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that killed 116 people. By mid-2005, the Philippine government says Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, had trained some 60 members of Abu Sayyaf to make bigger, better explosives. Two Jemaah...
...Sayyaf appeared, however, to lose ground after the army launched a major offensive against the organization in August 2006. Shortly thereafter, Khadaffy Janjalani and two other high-ranking Abu Sayyaf leaders with important connections to funding in the Middle East were killed. According to one analyst, Abu Sayyaf is running low on funds, and no new leader has come forward to unite the disgruntled factions within the group. And once again, Abu Sayyaf is back to kidnapping for ransom money as a means of funding its operations. In January, the group held three Red Cross workers hostage, and analysts suspect...
...long been a contentious issue. Recently, Philippine senators have urged President Gloria Arroyo to renegotiate the agreement that allows U.S. troops on Philippine soil, and the deaths of two U.S. soldiers will surely incite more debate. The Sept. 29 deaths, though, demonstrate that one thing is certain: Abu Sayyaf is still a dangerous, desperate terrorist group...