Inquirer Mindanao and Agence France-Presse
Australia’s Army chief secretly visited Mindanao on Thursday for a briefing on the military operations against two fugitives behind the deadly 2002 Bali bombings, the military said.Lt. Gen. Peter Leahy flew to Zamboanga where he was updated on the hunt for Omar Patek and Dulmatin from the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group.
Joint patrols by Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore are inadequate to secure the Malacca Straits if there is a major terrorist strike and foreign military help should be considered, experts said Tuesday.The three states straddling the strategic waterway launched coordinated maritime patrols in 2004 and air patrols last year after prodding from Washington, which feared terrorists could link up with pirates to blow up an oil tanker or use it as a floating bomb.
However, the three nations rejected foreign military help. Malaysia and Indonesia shot down a US proposal in 2004 to send an elite unit to help secure the pirate-infested strait.
The overall capabilities of the three littoral states are “evidently inadequate to provide a lasting security in the strait,” which remains a vulnerable maritime choke point, said Gurpreet Khurana, research fellow at India’s Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis.
Philippine government forces have killed more than 80 Abu Sayyaf rebels in three days of fierce fighting in Sulu, some 900 kilometers south of Manila early this week, the local daily Manila Times reported Thursday. The report said six government troops were also killed and 19 others wounded on Monday in the fighting.
More than 5,000 troops were involved in the offensive against Abu Sayyaf rebels in Sulu, said the military earlier this week.
The problem was that those manhunts came up empty. Finding a single individual who is intent on hiding, it turns out, is a tall order, even for a superpower. In a rare interview, Lieutenant General Dell Dailey, who has helped lead the hunt for al-Qa’ida’s founder, explains why. “Our manhunting skills are dramatically better than ever before and the envy of other nations,” Dailey says, but they cannot always penetrate safe havens that are politically, geographically or culturally protected.
Nobody understands this better than the Pentagon’s special operations people. As director of the Centre for Special Operations in Tampa, Florida, Dailey is the architect of the US military’s global counterterrorism plan, known as OPLAN 7500. The plan is classified but the thinking behind it is not.
The strategy relies increasingly on allies such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and has broadened from that of a basic manhunt to a mission that includes training partner nations in counterterrorism, intelligence and civil affairs, eliminating safe havens and attacking the ideological underpinnings of radical Islamism. “We will take away bin Laden’s base,” Dailey says. “We will take away his popular support and his regional support through all those indirect methods. And once that’s happened, we will kill him.”
The commander of the Philippine Marine Corps on Friday vowed to give justice to six of his men who were killed in last Monday’s clash with the group of Abu Sayyaf chieftain Khadaffy Janjalani in the jungles of Sulu.
“We will pursue these terrorists relentlessly until we finish them off. Their days are numbered,” said Marine commandant Maj. Gen. Nelson Allaga, adding that the killing of the six Marine soldiers will not go in vain.
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ONE of world’s most wanted terrorists, al Qaeda operative Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah, may be still hiding in Trinidad and Tobago or Guyana and has, in his possession, a T&T passport.
Shukrijumah, 31, is one of the most wanted terrorists by the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI says he is “wanted in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States.”