Word: southern
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...small band of U.S. and Philippine soldiers were on their way to pick up supplies for a local school on the southern Philippine island of Jolo on Sept. 29 when their vehicle rolled over a land mine. The blast killed two U.S. soldiers and one Filipino marine, and though authorities are still investigating the incident, analysts immediately pointed the finger at the militant Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf known to be active in the area...
...Much to the frustration of military advisers who want them in bigger conflict zones, the U.S. military keeps a small number of highly skilled soldiers in the southern Philippines to help train local troops in their ongoing fight against Abu Sayyaf, which the U.S. State Department believes has only between 200 and 500 active members today. The Philippine military told a reporter that the U.S. troops in the Sept. 29 incident were not involved in any combat operations but "were just there to help in building a school." The deaths were the first U.S. military casualties to occur...
...Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, a former Filipino Islamic scholar who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, founded the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf in 1991, splitting from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) - a more mainstream Islamic political organization fighting for increased autonomy for Muslims in the southern Philippines - after the MNLF engaged in peace talks with the government...
...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...