Word: sayyaf
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...Despite the threats, the President is holding firm. Arroyo, say her advisers, wants to keep Abu Sayyaf on the run. The last time the group took hostages from a tourist resort?21 were seized in April last year on Sipadan, a famous diving site on the Malaysian coast?they collected an estimated $25 million in ransom. But even before the Sipadan raid, the name Abu Sayyaf raised alarm among Western intelligence agencies. Abu Sayyaf kept surfacing in connection with various plots by Islamic terrorist Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, now serving a life sentence for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing...
...Sayyaf is also fragmented, having split into three factions after the military killed its founder-leader Abdurajak Janjalani in 1998. That exacerbates Arroyo's challenge. Even if her government manages to capture the current rebels, there are two more outfits ready to kidnap and kill in the future. "It was easier to deal with them when they had a single leader?and an ideology," says a Basilan politician. "Now, these guys are in it for the money, and there's no stopping them...
...Khost, Janjalani made up for his diminutive size with ferocity and his oratory, honed at Islamic universities in Libya and Syria. He reverentially appropriated Sayyaf's name (which means "swordsman" in Arabic) for his group back home. In 1991, Abu Sayyaf struck its first blow by killing two American evangelists in a grenade blast in Zamboanga. This was followed by a string of kidnappings, massacres and extortion operations. Cassette tapes of Janjalani's jihad sermons began circulating, and other gangs of Moro brigands in the Sulu islands?who specialized in running drugs and guns, kidnapping and growing marijuana?accepted Janjalani...
...Another Afghan jihad graduate also turned up: bomber Ramzi Yousef. Philippine police sources believe Yousef may have tried to recruit Abu Sayyaf for two bloody schemes in 1995: the assassination of Pope John Paul II in Manila and a plan to plant bombs on U.S. airliners flying out of the Philippines. Plagued throughout his terrorist career by clumsiness, Yousef managed to set fire to his apartment just a week before the Pontiff's arrival, and police found timing devices, 12 fake passports and a business card belonging to bin Laden's brother-in-law, Khalifa. There is no evidence, local...
...Janjalani was shot down by police in 1998. Since then, say Philippine counter-terrorism experts, Abu Sayyaf's ties with international Islamic terrorism may have broken. At the same time, leadership of the group splintered into two main factions: the first, which is currently holding the hostages in Basilan, has a figurehead in Janjalani's younger brother, Khadaffy. But the real chief is Abu Sabaya, a former media communications student who worked in Saudi Arabia before gravitating to the Afghan training camps. A cleric familiar with the group's history says that Abu Sabaya, whose real name is Ahmad Salayudi...