An op-ed piece of mine on the current, and somewhat disturbing, state of the Abu Sayyaf is supposed to be in Friday's International Herald Tribune.
Congratulations! This keeps up, you won't be posting with the likes of us. The latest I spotted on that little band was this.
Abu Sayyaf is the smaller of the Islamist groups fighting to establish an Iranian-style Islamic state in Mindanao, an island in the southern Philippines.
The Abu Sayyaf group, whose name means, “Bearer of the Sword,” split from the Moro National Liberation Front in 1991. Although based almost exclusively in the southern islands, Abu Sayyaf has ties to a number of Islamic fundamentalist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Ladin’s al-Qaida and Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of organizing the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
Abduragak Abubakar Janjalani, the former leader of the group, like Osama bin Ladin, was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Abu Sayyaf has a membership of approximately several hundreds of young Islamic radicals, many of whom were recruited from univerities and high schools. |
