Word: sayyaf
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...town of Panamao. The rebels say that the ambush was provoked by a military offensive the day before in which a local ustadz, or religious mentor, his wife and two children died. (The military is silent on that story.) The rebels include members of Abu Sayyaf, an al-Qaeda linked kidnap-for-ransom group, and renegades of the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.), a Muslim group that once fought for a separate state. The military estimates the rebels' numbers at 800. By the end of the week, the armed forces had sent seven battalions?roughly 3,000 soldiers...
...Jolo is one of the Philippines' wildest places. Abu Sayyaf uses it as a refuge from the law; the group's traditional base is the island of Basilan to the north. The M.N.L.F. was actually born on Jolo in the late-1960s, from which it spread its call for an independent Muslim Mindanao. In the 1970s and '80s, at least 100,000 people were killed in that insurgency through much of the south. In 1996, M.N.L.F. leader Nur Misuari signed a peace deal with the government: Misuari became governor of most of the south and the group disarmed. (A splinter...
...Asian terrorist groups. First, local jihadists are behaving like al-Qaeda, from which they take their inspiration. Between 2002 and 2004, Jemaah Islamiah (J.I.), the regional group closest to al-Qaeda, conducted three mass-fatality suicide attacks against Western targets, including the bombing of nightclubs in Bali. The Abu Sayyaf group bombed a superferry in February 2004 in the Philippines, the worst maritime terrorist attack in history. And, in 2003, Singaporean and Indonesian authorities disrupted an al-Qaeda-style operation by a J.I. cell to hijack an Aeroflot plane from Bangkok and crash it into the international airport in Singapore...
...changed its spots yet again? Ironically, the Philippine authorities may have been a victim of their own success. Security officials say that after a concerted drive against the group?heavily backed by Washington in what was called its "second front" in the war on terror?scores of senior Abu Sayyaf leaders have been killed or arrested in the past year. Most notable was the capture in December 2003 of Ghalib Andang?a.k.a. Commander Robot?infamous for his sneering viciousness during the 2000 hostage taking. His arrest and the death of key supporters in the group opened...
...M.I.L.F., according to Murad, is not allied with Abu Sayyaf, and he questions Abu Sayyaf's conversion to Islamic ideals and to the cause of a separate Muslim nation in the southern Philippines. "The original Abu Sayyaf group, under the older brother Abdurajak, had a political objective," he says. "As far as the personality of the younger brother Khadaffy is concerned, he's not an ideological leader and I don't know how much control he has with the organization...