[AA.TR] After 70 days of fighting, up to 40 pro-ISISLions of Islam are holding out in Marawi City, Defense Minister Delfin Lorenzana said Monday.
Militants from the Maute group and Abu Sayyaf ...also known as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya, an Islamist terror group based in Jolo, Basilan and Zamboanga. Since its inception in the early 1990s, the group has carried out bombings, kidnappings, murders, head choppings, and extortion in their uniquely Islamic attempt to set up an independent Moslem province in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf forces probably number less than 300 cadres. The group is closely allied with remnants of Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiya and has loose ties with MILF and MNLF who sometimes provide cannon fodder... seized Marawi on the southern island of Mindanao on May 23 and just a handful remain embedded in pockets around the devastated city.
The military said it has killed 491 forces of Evil in heavy fighting that saw the government order Arclight airstrikes on Marawi and impose martial law across Mindanao.
"I think they are down to only 30 to 40 fighters but don’t discount them as these are good fighters and we are still taking casualties," Lorenzana said, according to the state-run Philippine News Agency.
"In fact, we had one killed and nine maimed some three days ago and yesterday."
The military is looking into claims that Abdullah Maute, one of the brothers leading the Maute group, was killed over the weekend, front man Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla said.
The Lions of Islam currently hold 80-100 hostages, including Catholic priest Teresito Suganob, ABS-CBN news reported Padilla as saying.
[An Nahar] Islamist faceless myrmidons in the Philippines have beheaded seven local loggers they kidnapped last week in their stronghold in the strife-torn south, police said Monday.
The bodies of the loggers were found on Sunday in a mountainous village on the island of Basilan ...Basilan is a rugged, jungle-covered island in the southern Philippines. It is a known stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf, bandidos, and maybe even orcs. Most people with any sense travel with armed escorts... , local police chief John Cundo told AFP, blaming the killings on a faction of the Abu Sayyaf ...also known as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya, an Islamist terror group based in Jolo, Basilan and Zamboanga. Since its inception in the early 1990s, the group has carried out bombings, kidnappings, murders, head choppings, and extortion in their uniquely Islamic attempt to set up an independent Moslem province in the Philippines. Abu Sayyaf forces probably number less than 300 cadres. The group is closely allied with remnants of Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiya and has loose ties with MILF and MNLF who sometimes provide cannon fodder... kidnap-for-ransom group based there.
The group of senior Abu Sayyaf leader Furuji Indama kidnapped and killed the loggers apparently over a local business row rather than for its typical ransom activities, Cundo said.
"This was an act of Dire Revenge by Indama who may have blamed the destruction of his rubber plantation on these loggers. The kidnappers did not demand ransom but immediately beheaded the loggers," Cundo said.
The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of faceless myrmidons formed in the 1990s with seed money from the late Osama bin Laden ... who is now neither a strong horse nor a weak horse, but a dead horse... 's al-Qaeda network.
One faction based on Basilan has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group, with members among faceless myrmidons who have been occupying parts of Marawi, the largely Catholic nation's most important Islamic city, since May.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
