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| Southeast Asia |
| Newsweek on MILF |
| 2004-08-30 |
| Al-haj Murad Ebrahim is what you might call an old-school revolutionary. The leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has spent three decades in the jungles of the troubled southern Philippine region of Mindanao, battling to carve out an independent state for its downtrodden Muslim population. But more recently the MILF has tacitly supported terrorist bombings of civilian targets by foreign Islamic jihadists, an unsavory alliance in the post-September 11 world. As he prepares for formal peace talks with the Philippine government, Murad faces a stark choice—either steer the MILF back to its nationalist roots or drive it into the arms of international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. "I think he's prepared to have a negotiated settlement with the government," says Silvestre Afable, Manila's chief peace negotiator, "and has decided that the MILF will have nothing to do with terrorists." The predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines, not to mention the rest of Southeast Asia, can only hope he's right. The MILF has been accused of protecting training camps in its territory run by Jemaah Islamiah, or JI—a regional terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda—for nearly a decade. According to U.S. and Filipino officials in Manila, the Mindanao camps have been nothing short of a mini-Afghanistan, providing JI a sanctuary within a lawless region to train recruits and plan operations against the United States and its regional allies. Other terrorist organizations, including kidnapping specialists Abu Sayyaf, are also believed to be training there. Graduates of the camps have been linked to some of the world's worst terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the Bali bombings two years ago that killed 202 people and the suspicious sinking of a ferry near Manila in February that killed 116. Bomb expert Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, who played a role in several bombings in the Philippines and Indonesia in 2002, is believed to have worked as an instructor in the camps in 1996. (Al-Ghozi was killed by soldiers in Mindanao last October.) Analysts say the camps are giving JI—which has been battered by hundreds of arrests in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia since the Bali attacks—a second wind. "As long as JI is able to regenerate new recruits, they will be a threat," says Rohan Gunaratna, a regional terrorism analyst. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |