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| Philippine Camps Are Training Al Qaeda’s Allies |
| 2003-05-31 |
| No suprises here, this has been going on for a decade For the last six to nine months, recruits mostly from Indonesia and Malaysia, but also a few from as far off as Pakistan and the Middle East, have received training at inaccessible, rough-hewn sites — basically a few huts and some tents — in a marshy region on the island of Mindanao, officials said. The training is similar to what their older colleagues in terrorism got in Afghanistan when that served as Al Qaeda's base, they added. In Mindanao, though, the training appears to include more of a special emphasis on the use of sophisticated explosives, the officials said. "We've closed the camps in Afghanistan, but they're still operating in the southern Philippines," said an Australian official in Canberra. More broadly, intelligence officials say there is a constant movement of international terrorists across an area that includes Mindanao, islands in the Sulu Sea, the Malaysian state of Sabah and northern Indonesia. The training camps are in an area under the control of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which has been waging a guerrilla war for an independent state for 25 years, officials said. Hundreds of Qaeda recruits trained at Moro camps in the late 1990's, including some of the men being tried in the Bali bombing, Western officials said. But those camps were destroyed by the Philippine Army in 2000, and Moro rebels have steadfastly denied any links to Al Qaeda. A new round of training began at several sites six to nine months ago, officials said. Similarly, in recent months, Al Qaeda has reorganized bases of operation in a number of other places, including Kenya, Sudan and Chechnya, according to senior counterterrorism officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East. At the Moro camps, courses vary in length from two weeks to three months, instructors are Indonesians and Arabs as well as Filipinos, and graduates receive a certificate, a Philippine intelligence officer said. There are 30 to 40 students in a class, most of them Filipinos joining the Moro rebels, along with the foreigners sent by Jemaah Islamiyah, he said. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |