Suspected militant training camps stormed; 23 Filipino soldiers killed
MANILA - In one of the deadliest clashes in the southern Philippines in recent years, at least 31 suspected terrorists and 23 soldiers were killed as government troops stormed training camps of the Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf, military officials said yesterday.
More than 400 soldiers and police commandos launched predawn attacks Wednesday against the group’s jungle camps on Basilan, an island province in the southern Philippines.
Abu Sayyaf, which was founded on Basilan in 1991 with the aim of establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state, has been linked by Western and Asian intelligence agencies to Al Qaeda and is on a United States government list of foreign terrorist organizations. Although weakened in recent years, the group continues to have a presence in the south, with ambushes of government forces and kidnappings of aid workers and journalists.
Major General Benjamin Dolorfino, commander of the Western Mindanao Command of the Philippine military, said Abu Sayyaf had help from members of the separatist group Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who he said had tried to collect weapons from fallen government soldiers at the site of the raid. The front, in a statement, confirmed that 10 of its members were killed but denied that they were working with the Abu Sayyaf. Eid Kabalu, a spokesman for the front, said government soldiers had attacked the guerrillas first.
The front has been fighting for a separate Islamic state for decades, while the Abu Sayyaf, military officials say, has increasingly degenerated into kidnapping, extortion, and banditry, using ransom payments to finance its operations.
General Dolorfino said 20 marines and three army soldiers had died in the raids. He said an initial body count of 31 dead militants was likely to rise.
Officials said the forces were so close to each other that “it almost came to hand-to-hand combat,’’ Rear Admiral Alexander Pama, a military commander on Basilan, told Reuters.
General Dolorfino called it a “slugfest’’ and said “it was really close-quarter fighting, so we couldn’t use our artillery,’’ the Associated Press reported.
Two senior Abu Sayyaf leaders, Khair Mundus and Furuji Indama, had been the principal targets of the raids, said Lieutenant Steffani Cacho, an army spokeswoman, but it was not immediately clear whether they were among the dead.
The raids in Basilan began at 3 a.m. Wednesday and lasted until evening, Dolorfino said. The camps were being used for explosives training, according to an army spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Romeo Brawner Jr.
