Joe Bob's America: Abu Sayyaf Who?

NEW YORK, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- I've been trying to get up to speed on Abu Sayyaf, the Number Two terrorist group on the Pentagon hit list, and I'm giving up. I'm gonna hire a guy named Vinnie to keep track of it for me. And to start out, I'm having him make a list of the 7,478 Philippine islands that these guys may or may not be hiding in.

This thing is a needle in a manure pile. I don't get it. First we take on an entire country, depose the government, scatter the army, imprison thousands of bad guys, install a new government, and basically Rambo-ize Central Asia.

And now, huffing and puffing, we say we're gonna launch PHASE TWO:

Fifty guys hiding in the jungle, eating dried fish and noodles. This is the best "international terrorism" target we could come up with?

The only thing about 'em that makes the word "international" even remotely true is that they took some hostages at a beach resort in Malaysia before puttering back home in their speedboat. (Yes, they own a speedboat.) And, oh yeah, one of their leaders -- the one who's been dead for three years -- was a mujahedin in the '80s.

Most of the time they just hang around the jungle in their home country, waiting for the next priest, tourist, missionary or journalist to bumble into base camp. Like a bad drive-in movie, anybody can become a hostage at any moment. What am I missing here?

Remember all through the nineties when various Congressmen would say, "We can't be the world's policeman"? Well, welcome to the Filipino S.W.A.T. team.

It's more than a little ironic that in the same jungles where B-movie directors shot machine-gun battles for three decades, using the Philippines to double for Vietnam, there are guys who look like extras in those movies staging raids and capers that would be rejected by Hollywood as too unbelievable. On second thought, I seem to remember a Chuck Norris movie that may have been the inspiration for the Malaysian beach-resort snatch.

And that's just how goofy these guys are.

I wonder if we'd be getting our hands dirty at all if it weren't for two of their current hostages -- there have been hundreds -- being missionaries from Kansas. These guys haven't even managed to take over a single town in the southern Muslim part of the Philippines, so who really believes they could bring about an Islamic fundamentalist state in the Catholic part? For seven years now, they haven't even talked much about Islamic theory, because they've been too busy kidnapping people for cash.

At any rate, we now have 6,660 men on our team --5,000 Filipino soldiers, 500 American troops, and 160 American "trainers" -- trying to flush out AT MOST 100 hard-core Abu Sayyaf guys.

This is sort of like the summer Olympics when the first round of the basketball competition matches the U.S. against Zimbabwe. The only reason we should be afraid of Abu Sayyaf at all is that apparently our own CIA trained some of them back in the '80s. We were running out of mujahedin at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, so we actually sent agents to the Philippines on recruiting missions.

Most of those guys ended up in something called the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but the Abu Sayyaf split off from them in 1991 under the leadership of Abduragak Abubakar Janjalani. (They have special madrasas in the Philippines where people are taught to pronounce "Abduragak Abubakar Janjalani.")

Abu Sayyaf looked like a hundred other revolutionary cells that want to set up an Iranian-style Muslim state, but everything is weirder in the Philippines and so this one decided its terrorist tool of choice would be the Western hostage. Since the only Westerners who go to that part of the Philippines are a) guys looking for 15-year-old Filipino brides, b) priests, and c) missionaries, they had to load up on Filipino hostages until they spotted an honest-to-God foreigner on the loose. When that got too frustrating, they started hitting the resort spas.

In 1992 they pulled off their first abduction, of a Davao, Philippines, businessman. They held him three months and somebody paid a ransom. They moved on in the kidnapping world, snatching a 5-year-old kindergarten student, a Claretian priest, and quite a few Catholic missionaries, mainly because they blame the Catholics for everything they hate about the Philippines. They also tried to kill the pope when he came through in 1995, but that job was way over their heads and the popemobile remained secure.

But what's strange about the story is that it now appears that the idea of becoming professional kidnappers was devised by a Philippine government agent who had infiltrated Abu Sayyaf and proceeded to help them with their crimes, Patty Hearst-style, until he was finally arrested and charged with 54 counts of kidnapping and murder. Then, this being the Philippines, the double agent was acquitted because, the judge said, he was obviously working for the government when he committed those crimes. Once released, the guy was so angry at being forced to stand trial that he joined the rebels for real, and staged an elaborate hostage surrender -- just so he could fail to show up and make the police look stupid. Shortly thereafter he was killed.

Who did it? Well, have you got five hours to spend in a Manila bar listening to all the possible theories?

But that's not all. In their early kidnapping days, Abu Sayyaf liked to invite journalists to join them in the jungle for boiled vegetables and late-night Scrabble games. One such journalist, a woman named Arlyn de la Cruz, stayed for a long time and may or may not have become the girlfriend of Gadhafi Janjalani, the younger brother of Abduragak Abubakar Janjalani who became the Head Terrorist after bubba died.

She says, in the time-honored tradition of the gossip columns, that they were "just friends." She does reveal in her upcoming book, however, that on the eve of his wedding to a 16-year-old girl, Khadafy Janjalani called her on the phone and told her that he would call off the wedding if she would tell him to do so.

Just a lovesick terrorist? Or a man seeking revenge for a nasty breakup? We'll never know because . . . it's the Philippines!

The Philippines media reports all this with a straight face. In one news account, Abu Sayyaf's organized crimes are listed as kidnapping, bombing, looting, burning, killing and "illegal logging." Does this mean they periodically don lumberjack shirts and wield chainsaws while their hostages are tethered to trees back at the forest clearing?

President Gloria Arroyo just calls them "a money-crazed gang of criminals," which seems closest to the mark, but what's interesting is how they got that way in the first place.

On April 23, 2000, they hit a Malaysian diving resort off Sipadan. They could only find 10 tourists to kidnap, so they rounded up 11 resort workers as well. They took everybody to the island of Jolo, where mediators were sent to talk to them. They KIDNAPPED THE MEDIATORS, including journalists and preachers. On Aug. 27 they let everyone go after receiving a ransom of $20 million. (They had asked for a million per hostage, but I guess they were running a "Buy 20, get one free" sale that week.)

But here's the good part. Who paid the ransom? Most intelligence sources believe it was none other than Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. To which I say "Huh?" I haven't even seen any good intelligence THEORIES about that one. (Some reports also claim Gadhafi stuffed them for the money.) At any rate, they used part of the proceeds to buy their now famous speedboat.

With beach resorts being so lucky for them, they hit another one last May -- the Dos Palmas resort off Palawan -- carting off their now standard 20 hostages, including three Americans.

But military discipline in Abu Sayyaf being what it is, they were only able to retain three of them as some escaped, some were released, some were bargained away and some were just too damn much trouble. Most of them got away during a June standoff in which the terrorists were cornered in a hospital and church in Lamitan. Although surrounded, they managed to escape, some say with the help of corrupt police officers. But like gold prospectors searching for the treasure of the Sierra Madre, they started feuding about the sloppy work that cut into their expected haul, so while fleeing from what had seemed almost certain death in Lamitan, they managed to find 15 more hostages.

The current toll stands at 32 kidnapped foreigners and hundreds of Filipinos who have, at one time or another, been in the custody and control of Abu Sayyaf. They're believed to be on either Basilan, Sulu, or Tawi-Tawi, and they're not to be confused with another Abu Sayyaf that is commanded by a guy named Commander Robot.

The local media recently called for a quick and expeditious operation by the combined American-Filipino posse, because "the situation is hurting the tourism business."

In other words, it's the Philippines. You're not gonna figure it out.

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his website at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.)