"We don’t think there’s much left in them," Ricciardone said, speaking two weeks before a 1,000-member US military advisory mission pulls out of Mindanao by July following a six-month joint campaign against the Muslim rebel group.
"They’ve been much diminished in terms of whatever formality and organization they had. At least one of its five principal leaders has been killed, the others are on the run. The numbers of fighters clearly are much diminished," he told reporters.
But the remnants of the group "remain to be mopped up" from among a substantial base of support among relatives in the Muslim areas in Mindanao.
Ricciardone also warned that "the conditions from which they sprang from need to be addressed – the poverty, the poor environment, the joblessness, the hopelessness in which they work and within which they terrorize their own communities."
It must be "addressed and cleaned up, otherwise there are people like them who will continue to take their places. So the story is not over, the job is not done."
The Abu Sayyaf, a group of several hundred loosely organized Muslim guerrilla groups with alleged ties to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, had terrorized the southern Philippines with a three-year campaign of kidnappings for ransom.
A senior Abu Sayyaf leader, Abu Sabaya, was believed slain in a Philippine military operation last month following the rescue of US hostage Gracia Burnham.
The rescue attempt left her husband, Martin Burnham, and Filipina captive Edibora Yap dead. The gunmen had beheaded a third American captive, Guillermo Sobero, in June last year.
Ricciardone warned that the al-Qaeda infrastructure in the region remained intact.
While links between the al-Qaeda, the group held responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, and militant groups in Southeast Asia like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah are "loose" and "tenuous," he said "the network is there."
Manila this year separately sentenced to long prison terms two Indonesian Muslim militants accused of bomb attacks.
"Having people come here or training people outside or providing funds or providing (training) on how to make bombs and where to place them, those kinds of things seem to be going on," Ricciardone said. – AFP