U.S. troops to join hunting down Abu Sayyaf militants

MANILA, February 18 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Four Abu Sayyaf gunmen and a Filipino soldier died in a gun battle Tuesday, February 18, in southern Philippines, where U.S. forces are to join local troops in fighting the Abu Sayyaf rebels.

Soldiers stormed an Abu Sayyaf encampment near Bandang on the island of Jolo where some 50 rebels were hiding, triggering the gun battle that killed the rebels and soldier, said military southern command chief Lieutenant General Narciso Abaya.

Radio intercepts indicated Mujib Susukan, one of five Abu Sayyaf leaders on the island, was critically wounded in the encounter, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The Abu Sayyaf is a self-styled militant group known for kidnapping foreigners and for planting bombs.

The group in Jolo is still holding three Indonesian seamen and four Filipino Christian preachers seized last year.

The group is considered a "foreign terrorist organization" by the United States, which has offered a five million-dollar bounty for the group's top leaders in connection with the kidnapping and murder of two Americans in the past two years.

A suspected Abu Sayyaf bomb killed a U.S. soldier in the southern city of Zamboanga last year.

Commenting on the American troops participation in tracking down Abu Sayyaf fighters, armed forces chief of staff General Dionisio Santiago said: "As far as we are concerned, it is just like the previous Balikatan."

He was referring to the codename for a joint U.S.-Philippines military operation against the Abu Sayyaf on the southern island of Basilan last year.

"They (U.S. soldiers) will be there to monitor their (Filipino soldiers') performance. We will just validate whether our troops learned anything from the training," he told reporters.

Filipino military training director Major General Emmanuel Teodosio said it was possible the units involved in the Jolo operation would be the same as those scheduled to start six months of joint training at a military camp near Zamboanga on Monday.

"The training is supposed to be completed in the middle of the year," he told reporters.

U.S. Major General Joseph Weber is to visit the Philippines over the next few days to discuss the Jolo operation with Teodosio.

Manila said on Monday, February 17, that the U.S. Jolo mission would help local troops deal with threats posed by the Abu Sayyaf.

But some residents of the impoverished and violence-torn majority-Muslim region expressed apprehension at the public passions that could be stirred up by the presence of Western soldiers there.

U.S. troops were last in Jolo during the American colonial period, when they mounted a brutal pacification campaign against the Philippines' Muslim minority between 1899 and 1913.

Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes downplayed the issue, saying Munir Arbison, the mayor of the Jolo town of Luuk, volunteered his municipality "for the staging of this military exercise."

In Basilan, the Americans were allowed to accompany Filipino soldiers who were hunting for the Abu Sayyaf.

But the U.S. troops were barred from taking part in actual combat except in self-defense.

The U.S. soldiers also rehabilitated some of the island's crumbling ports and airstrips, built roads and artesian wells, and gave medical help to poor residents.

Washington has been boosting military aid to Manila since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, worried that al-Qaeda militants flushed out by the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan could have set up bases in Southeast Asia.