Word: sayyaf
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...Taliban turned tail in Afghanistan and U.S. troops are helping to mop up Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. But smoking out evil in Indonesia is fast becoming a foggy affair. Case in point: a supposedly top-secret document entitled 'Jihad War in Southeast Asia' outlined a plan to blow up the U.S. embassies in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore on Dec. 4. This screed fell into the hands of Indonesian police and surfaced in January as an exclusive for Singapore's Straits Times. A costly slip by the evildoers, it would seem. But why would the authors, purportedly from the radical...
...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 Philippine soldiers stomp out Abu Sayyaf, a kidnap-extortion gang on Basilan holding two Americans and one Filipino hostage. The gang once had ties to al-Qaeda, notably through Ramzi Yousef, who tried destroying the World Trade Center in February 1993 and two years later planned the Manila-based Bojinka Plot to blow 11 airliners...
...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...
...Officially, however, the U.S. is only concerned about the smaller Abu Sayyaf. The MILF doesn't appear as a "designated foreign terrorist organization" in the State Department's latest bad guys list. There's no talk of targeting the group if or when Abu Sayyaf are mopped up. When Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo visited Washington in November, she said she and U.S. President George W. Bush had no disagreements on how to combat terrorism in her country. "Where I draw the line," she said, "he draws the line...
...send the engines to a tinder fire when the jungle to the north is smoldering dangerously? One reason is that Abu Sayyaf is a more squashable threat. Although its Basilan contingent has evaded 6,000 poorly trained Philippine troops for the past year and currently holds two Americans hostage, it's an operation that can be wrapped up in months, rather than years. (A bomb and grenade went off in public areas in the south over the weekend, probably a protest of the U.S. troops' role...