The Philippines’ Terrorist Refuge

Poor and lawless, the southern Philippine region of Mindanao has for decades hosted criminal gangs engaging in everything from gunrunning to extortion to kidnapping. It has also provided a haven for insurgent groups seeking to establish Islamic or communist states. Hardly a week goes by without a firefight, a bomb attack or a snatching. Just last Tuesday, the Philippine military unleashed yet another full-scale offensive near the town of Pikit against Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) militants, resulting in the deaths of at least 160 guerrillas and eight soldiers, and prompting the exodus of some 40,000 civilians.

But Mindanao’s Islamic rebels now seem to be after more than a home alone. TIME has learned that elements of these same separatist movements have become a nexus for Southeast Asian terrorists and are providing a training ground for operatives linked to Jemaah Islamiah (JI), the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist network widely blamed for last October’s deadly Bali bombings. Officially, the army says it launched last week’s operation to pursue a kidnap-for-ransom gang (called the Pentagon) that was being given sanctuary by the MILF. Another goal was to disperse a concentration of 1,000 MILF fighters on the edge of the Liguasan marshes, an expanse of waterways and islands that make up one of the group’s few remaining strongholds. Philippine and Western military-intelligence sources are asserting, however, that in the past three months scores of Indonesian and Malaysian Islamic militants belonging to JI have slipped into MILF jungle camps, some of which are located in the very marshes bombarded last week. Most of these militants are gravitating toward a JI cell headed by Saifullah “Muklis” Yunos, the Philippines’ most wanted terrorist. “JI is undoubtedly active in Mindanao,” says a Western intelligence official, “which makes what’s happening there a threat to the entire region.”

That Mindanao seems to be morphing from being mainly a separatist issue for the Philippines into a terrorist problem for the rest of Southeast Asia has Malaysian and Indonesian officials on full alert. (Both countries have porous maritime borders with Mindanao.) Over recent weeks, Malaysian police have detained six suspects in the town of Sandakan in Borneo for arranging the transport of JI recruits to Mindanao. Meanwhile, Indonesian police say that several of the 18 men arrested for plotting and executing the Dec. 5 bombing of a McDonald’s outlet in Makassar in South Sulawesi province have confessed to being trained in Mindanao. And investigators now allege a link between the Mindanao camps and the Bali bomb plot. “Mindanao is where the Bali bombers tried to get weapons for other operations,” says a member of the investigative team, who adds that documents found in the possession of Bali suspects listed serial numbers for weapons that were known to belong to the MILF. “For JI, Malaysia and Singapore are used primarily for financing and the Philippines for training. Indonesia is where they put everything into practice.”

Indonesian, Malaysian and even Arab extremists have previously been known to take refuge in Mindanao. For example, both Agus Dwikarna and Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, two prominent Indonesian militants currently under arrest in Manila for possession of explosives, did stints in Mindanao in the late 1990s. The MILF willingly provided training facilities to foreign fighters, but in the days following the war to oust the Soviets in Afghanistan, the group’s hospitality was motivated more by international Islamist solidarity than by anti-Western jihad. In 2000, the Philippine military overran all of the MILF’s basesincluding its two biggest camps, Abubakar and Bushra, which hosted militants from overseas. But since 9/11 and especially the Bali bombing, the authorities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have been cracking down hard on Islamic radicals at home, sending many of them scurrying back to Mindanao and its largely unpoliced coastline. “These are fresh intakes,” says a Philippine military-intelligence official in Manila. “They’re coming in on small boats, entering the country clandestinely.”

Why is Mindanao again proving so hospitable to foreign terrorists? The short answer is that the Philippine government is divided over how to tackle the MILF. Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes and the army favor a military solution. But while operations like last week’s take place periodically, Manila is simultaneously pursuing negotiations with the MILF leadership. For fear of derailing these talksand despite additional pressure from the U.S., which has about 300 troops stationed in the Philippines to train the country’s military in counterterrorism techniquesPresident Gloria Macapagal Arroyo refuses to have the MILF designated a terrorist group or to order an all-out assault. Previous negotiations with the Moro National Liberation Front, the MILF’s one-time parent organization, have little benefited the region, which remains deeply impoverished. As a result, growing numbers of MILF members are drifting away from their central leadership and becoming further radicalized. “Younger members are growing impatient over the slow progress,” says presidential adviser Norberto Gonzales. “There are these Afghan-trained guerrillas who don’t listen to the MILF hierarchy. It’s a tiny group, but it’s growing.”

The terrorist leading this schism, according to Gonzales and Philippine intelligence, is wanted-criminal Muklis, a former religious teacher from Marawi in central Mindanao who studied Islamic jurisprudence in Pakistan. In 1993, he and al-Ghozi crossed the border into Afghanistan, gaining expertise in explosives and demolitions. After returning to Mindanao, he headed the MILF’s Special Operation Group at Camp Bushra. But Muklis always served as a point man for JI within the MILF. According to al-Ghozi’s own testimony, Muklis was a principal player in the wave of bomb blasts that tore through Manila on Dec. 30, 2000. Philippine intelligence also reports he was involved in an October 2002 bus bombing in the capital. “If there are any Indonesian connections to Mindanao, then this is the group they’re dealing with,” says Gonzales. “The key person is Muklis. If we get Muklis, we pin down the group.”

Recent army reports have Muklis hiding out in the cloud-swathed mountain range that rises abruptly from the placid waters of Lake Lanao in central Mindanao. “Getting into that area is very, very difficult,” says Colonel Ernesto Boac, commander of the army brigade based in Marawi. Standing in front of a topographical wall map, he points to the densely wrinkled contours along the provincial border south of the lake. “It’s difficult getting human intelligence out of there, and we’re not picking up radio transmissions. It’s a black hole.” Not just for the Philip-pines, but increasingly for the rest of Southeast Asia, as well.