 Fighting between government forces and rogue Muslim rebels is spreading in the southern Philippines, shattering hopes for peace and threatening local support for a U.S.-backed campaign to flush out militants. A military spokesman said on Tuesday that army commandos were fanning out into the jungles of Jolo island, 600 miles (950 km) south of Manila, to hunt members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) after three days of pitched battle. "Our troops were now pursuing a separate group of MNLF rebels in another part of the island," Lieutenant-Colonel Bartolome Bacarro told reporters.
Seventeen rebels, three soldiers and one civilian have been killed since renegade MNLF commander Habier Malik fired mortars at marines on Friday night, triggering fierce retaliation by the military, which dropped 250-pound bombs on his base. Nearly 8,500 families have fled the fighting and thousands crammed into schools and gymnasiums in downtown Jolo, relying on food rations from disaster agencies.
In its campaign to destroy the Abu Sayyaf, the most militant of four Muslim rebel groups in the largely Catholic country, the military had been careful to avoid the use of air strikes in order to win round locals, tired of so-called "friendly fire". The troops' use of heavy bombs over the weekend and their targeting of the MNLF, which is seen as having more legitimacy than Abu Sayyaf, could undermine crucial local support. "It's going to complicate things because the MNLF probably have more local contacts, more traction with the locals then the Abu Sayyaf, who tend to be more thuggish," Tom Green, executive director of Pacific Strategies & Assessments, told Reuters. "Going against the MNLF means that a broader spectrum of people are affected because of blood ties, fathers, sons, uncles, brothers, that is going to complicate things."
Ustadz Habier Malik, an MNLF field commander loyal to jailed Muslim leader Nur Misuari, fired mortar rounds on a military base in Panamao town on Friday to retaliate against an attack by soldiers on MNLF positions in Indanan.
On Tuesday, the national police said seven people were taken captive by the Abu Sayyaf in Parang town, including six men working on a government road project. "The governor of Sulu was negotiating for the release of all seven hostages," said Joel Goltiao, police chief in the Muslim autonomous region, adding armed police officers were tracking down the Abu Sayyaf group behind the kidnapping. |
Philippine troops have arrested three Islamic militants on the resort island of Palawan and a spokesman said on Monday that they had been part of a cell plotting kidnappings and bombings in tourist areas. Troops arrested the three men on Sunday after four members of the cell were taken into custody last week. Military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Bartolome Bacarro said two suspected members of the radical Abu Sayyaf group had been arrested in the town of Espanola, which is dominated by members of the countrys Muslim minority. Hours later, military commandos stormed the house of a Muslim teacher in nearby Puerto Princesa City, seizing blasting caps, electrical wiring and chemicals used for making bombs, an army intelligence official said. The intelligence official said Ustadz Zainudin Gumubat, the head of a local madrasa called the al-Farouk Institute, was also arrested for links to Abu Sayyaf. The Abu Sayyaf, the smallest but deadliest Muslim rebel group in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country, is blamed for the killing of 100 people in a ferry bombing near Manila bay in 2004, the Philippines worst attack.
The suspected mastermind of the deadly 2002 Bali bombings appears to have given thousands of Philippine troops the slip, forcing them to shift their hunt to another island in the remote south of the country.
Scientists and villagers in the shadow of a churning volcano in the central Philippines fear today's full moon could finally spark a violent eruption. Volcanologists have warned that Mount Mayon, in the province of Albay, could explode at any time but that the gravitational pull of a full moon could provide the final push. "To put it in a simple way, it's like it massages a volcano," Ernesto Corpuz, head of monitoring and eruption prediction at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told Reuters.