Author: Raymond Bonner
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 31, 2003
The southern Philippines has become
the training center for Al Qaeda's Southeast Asia affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah,
drawing recruits from a number of countries, according to Western and Philippine
officials.
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.
A joint American-Philippine military
exercise scheduled to begin in a few weeks will have its locus on Sulu,
a group of islands in the middle of that zone.
"I'm convinced that Jemaah Islamiyah,
Al Qaeda and fellow travelers are able to move around Southeast Asia fairly
freely," a Western diplomat said.
Jemaah Islamiyah has been linked
to the nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people last year on
the Indonesian island of Bali. The group's leader is Abu Bakar Bashir,
American and Indonesian officials have said. He has not been charged in
the Bali case but is now on trial on treason charges and in the bombings
of several churches in Indonesia in December 2000. He has denied the charges.
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.
In one class, students learn to
take apart a watch, then put it together again as a timer for an explosive
device, he said. There is also a heavy dose of Islamic religious teaching.
The number of Jemaah Islamiyah recruits
who have gone through the recent training might be considered relatively
small - perhaps not more than 50, one intelligence official said - but
officials point out that a terrorist attack does not require a great number
of men.
Besides, officials said, it is not
the number that is alarming. The existence of the training "shows that
while all the focus has been on Afghanistan, there remains in our region
the infrastructure to continue to train people in terrorism," said an Australian
official in Canberra.
In interviews in several countries,
officials confirmed the Qaeda training that they said was now taking place
in the southern Philippines. They admitted that their information was sketchy,
and they were reluctant to provide details.
"You're into a highly classified
area here," an American official said.
In general, the information has
come from interrogations of Moro front and Jemaah Islamiyah members who
have been captured in Malaysia and Indonesia as well as here.
The relationship between the Moro
group, Jemaah Islamiyah and Al Qaeda demonstrates the amorphous nature
of the Qaeda movement. The Moro rebels have a limited goal: an independent
Islamic state on Mindanao. Jemaah Islamiyah, which was founded in the early
1970's and has been declared a terrorist organization by the United States
State Department, seeks the establishment of an Islamic state across an
arc of Southeast Asia.
Al Qaeda has often been likened
to a franchise operation, with Jemaah Islamiyah as the Southeast Asia franchisee.
Recently, the Indonesian government has begun to crack down on the group,
arresting a number of its leaders, including Mr. Bashir.
In the mid-1990's, when he was looking
for places to train recruits outside Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden sent
an emissary to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which controlled territory
and already had a military training course for its own purposes.
One Philippine group that Mr. bin
Laden rejected an affiliation with was Abu Sayyaf, which Filipino officials
say has degenerated into a group of bandits under a facade of Islamic radicalism.
Later this summer the United States
will conduct a joint military operation in the southern Philippines. It
is officially termed a training exercise, and its objective is the defeat
of Abu Sayyaf, the notorious kidnapping-for-ransom group, whose beheaded
victims include one American.
Questions have been raised, by many
Filipinos as well as officials in governments closely allied with the United
States in the campaign against terrorism, about why the United States is
going after Abu Sayyaf and not the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Abu Sayyaf is "practically null
and void," said a senior diplomat from one of America's major allies.
An official from another country
said, "To take out Abu Sayyaf may make everyone feel good, but it doesn't
remove a large chunk of the problem."
American officials say the only
solution to the Abu Sayyaf problem is a military one because the group
has no real political goal about which to negotiate.
But one official said that was not
the case with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is not considered
a terrorist organization by the United States. Therefore, he said, a a
negotiated political solution is possible.
The group has longstanding grievances
about decades of ill treatment and neglect of the Moro ethnic group on
Mindanao, which is Muslim. Although the island has some of the most fertile
land in the Philippines, supporting vast pineapple and banana plantations,
it is one of the poorest regions of the country, with the highest infant
mortality and lowest literacy.
"The M.I.L.F. is becoming stronger
and stronger, both in terms of numbers and in support from the local population,"
said one ambassador. "The economic situation in Mindanao is so bad that
the people have nothing to lose by joining the M.I.L.F."
The Philippine government's policy
toward the Moro front has been markedly inconsistent, several diplomats
here noted this week.
It has done everything except engage
in a serious development program in Mindanao, one ambassdor said. The government
has always talked about development and appointed cabinet ministers and
committees to deal with the issue, the ambassador added, but it has never
spent serious money.
Until recently the government thought
it could negotiate with the Moro rebels, but that changed after terrorist
attacks in March and April at the airport in Davao, the largest city in
Mindanao, and at a market.
As a result, on the eve of her state
visit to Washington earlier this month, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo
turned the army loose against the Moro rebels.
At the conclusion of that visit,
President Bush announced that the United States would commit itself diplomatically
and financially to finding a negotiated solution to the war.
The American role, which includes
a promise of at least $30 million in development assistance, has been embraced
by the leadership of the rebel group.
An American official said a negotiated
end to Moro rebellion would create a "less hospitable environment" for
training of international terrorists.
