Monday, July 26, 2004 US troops helping Mindanao quell terror threats
CARMEN -- Several US military advisers are in Mindanao to help the island rid itself of a growing reputation as a terrorist incubator, officials said Saturday.
While on Sunday, Australia's foreign minister accused the Philippines together with Spain of prompting a militant group's threat to bomb Australia unless it withdraws from Iraq, saying they had "empowered" terrorists by caving in to their demands.
Australia Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the threat by a group calling itself Islamic Tawhid Group, which claims to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Europe, was a direct result of Manila's withdrawal from Iraq to save the life of Filipino hostage Angelo dela Cruz.
US Army Special Forces members, meanwhile, quietly slipped into a sprawling Filipino infantry training camp in the central Mindanao town of Carmen over the past week, brigade commander Colonel Isagani Cachuela said.
They will conduct "small unit tactics training" for some 200 Filipino infantrymen and Marines starting Monday in the latest installment of an expanding program of counter-terrorist cooperation between the two allies.
JI threat
Cachuela said the exercise symbolized the resolve of the two governments to confront the threat posed by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which they both regard as the Southeast Asian proxy of Al-Qaeda, the group behind the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The Philippines is keen to restore its anti-terror credentials after reaping condemnation from Washington and other allies for pulling out of Iraq last week to save the life of dela Cruz.
One such criticism came from Australia, whose foreign minister said a threat from a group claiming to be an Al-Qaeda branch in Europe resulted from Manila and Madrid's caving in the demands of terrorists.
Downer said he had never heard of the group, which made similar threats against Poland and Bulgaria last week, and insisted that government would never give in to terrorist threats.
In Carmen, Colonel Cachuela said the exercises in Mindanao are in line with government's "serious effort to thwart terrorism." "We have to prepare ourselves through training," Cachuela said.
Training camps
The Americans in Mindanao kept to their hosts' barracks, whose flimsy walls comprise woven bamboo strips, at the weekend as the camp commander toured reporters through an unused firing range nearby.
Mindanao has been a concern of the US in recent years amid what is said to be evidence of terrorist training camps here.
Millions of dollars in development aid to its former colony is being funneled into Mindanao to convince the impoverished Muslim minority to turn toward economic development instead of finding common cause with extremists.
The military estimates about 60 JI militants have infiltrated Mindanao, mostly from neighboring Indonesia, and run at least one training camp on the Mount Cararao region near here.
Carmen, a mixed Muslim-Christian town of some 46,000 people, lies amidst emerald rice paddies. Flocks of brown ducks cavort on the swampy landscape and farmers spread sackfuls of corn seeds to dry beside the national highway.
But the pastoral calm is deceptive because the Americans are in the middle of another, older civil war.
Major battles
Only last year, Filipino soldiers fought major battles with the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) in nearby Pikit and Pagalungan towns, leaving scores dead and thousands of civilians displaced.
The 11,000-member MILF has been fighting for 26 years to set up a separate Islamic state in the southern third of this largely Roman Catholic country.
Brussels-based think-tank International Crisis Group warned two weeks ago that the JI was using ties with the MILF to train replacements for members arrested in Indonesia after the October 2002 Bali bombings.
Since the mid-1990s, it said Mindanao had become a main training ground for JI and other Islamic extremist groups. Weak policing "continues to make it a country of convenience for 'lone wolf' operators and cells of various jihadist organizations," the report said.
Not limited
J. Cofer Black, the US State Department's anti-terrorism coordinator, and Admiral Thomas Fargo, head of the US Pacific Command, have conveyed similar concerns in meetings with President Arroyo over the past year.
"When you train someone in Mindanao to devise bombs and how to plant them, that becomes a threat and it's not limited just to the immediate neighborhood where that person was trained," US Ambassador to Manila Francis Ricciardone said.
The MILF has denied having any links with JI.
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu says his group has been observing a ceasefire with the military for the past year and that the US military training activity is not an issue for the rebel group. (AFP)
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