New guerrilla training camp reported in Maguindanao

Peace advocates want the government to first investigate the reported existence of a new training camp allegedly of combined Jemaah Islamiyah and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) recruits in a hinterland area northeast of Camp Abubakar in Maguindanao, before resuming formal peace talks with the separatist group.

For over two months now, residents of Camp Abubakar, now a peace zone and guarded by three battalions of the Army’s 603rd Infantry Brigade, have been telling stories about a "new training camp" in the nearby Cararao area, about 12 hours’ walk from the brigade’s command headquarters located at the heart of the former MILF bastion.

Farmers in the vicinity of Cararao, a forested area near the boundary of Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao, claimed that guerrillas are being trained in Cararao by instructors who look like ordinary native Muslims but who allegedly speak a foreign language, which they believe could either be Indonesian or Malaysian.

More than a dozen religious leaders in the Maguindanao towns of Matanog, Buldon and Barira, known entry points to Camp Abubakar, said there are about 200 guerrillas being trained at the camp now.

Farming Community

The camp, they said, looks more of a farming community unlike the MILF’s former training school, the Abdurahman Bedis Military Academy, at Camp Abubakar.

"It’s very difficult to detect the training camp from the air because the trainees are scattered in makeshift shanties that are far from each other," said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified.

A Maguindanaoan public school teacher, who requested anonymity, said she knew of high school students in the first district of Maguindanao who disappeared for almost a month from their communities and who were reportedly later discovered to have undergone basic guerrilla training in Cararao.

An official of a military anti-kidnapping task force in Central Mindanao told reporters last month that they, indeed, have been receiving persistent feedback from civilian sources that there exists a newly established guerrilla training camp in Cararao.

Despite denials by the MILF’s central committee, local officials in Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao and North Cotabato are convinced that the front has been conniving with the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), as shown by the presence of Indonesians in Cararao and other hostile areas in Central Mindanao.

Al-Ghozi’s Sanctuary

In fact, slain JI member Fathur Rohman Al-Ghozi was reported to have hidden somewhere in the Liguasan Marsh a month before he was killed in an alleged shootout with law enforcers in Pigkawayan, North Cotabato last Oct. 12.

Al-Ghozi’s coddlers, ostensibly MILF rebels based in the Liguasan Marsh, even reportedly offered to reveal his whereabouts to the 2nd Marine Brigade in Pikit, North Cotabato in exchange for a P20-million reward.

Al-Ghozi, according to sources in Lanao del Sur’s political community, was a frequent visitor of Camp Abubakar before it fell to government control in 2000.

Last week, two Muslim farmers at Camp Abubakar both confided having seen last August "burned pieces" of what could be passports of Indonesians who underwent training at Camp Abubakar between 1998 and 2000.

Asked to elaborate, one of the farmers said at least six of the passports bore a seal of a palm tree that "looked like a coconut" and two crossed swords underneath the palm tree.

"We didn’t know they were important because we could not even read them so we picked them up and threw them into the river," one of them said in the Iranon dialect.

Free Aceh Or JI Men?

Army intelligence sources said the passports could belong to members of Indonesia’s Free Aceh Movement who the MILF had trained at Camp Abubakar before the military overran the area three years ago.

The sources, among them Muslim Army officers, said foreigners present in Cararao now could be members of the JI, not the Free Aceh Movement.

"Obviously, there is a peace overture now between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government. So sending its guerrillas to train in Mindanao may no longer be necessary," a senior Army intelligence officer said.

Only last month, Army and police operatives raided at least three suspected JI safehouses in Cotabato City and found bomb-making manuals and religious books in one of them.

It was also in Cotabato City where government agents arrested Taufik Rifqui, a senior JI official.

Local officials in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), where most Indonesian JI members are reportedly scattered, are pressing the government peace panel to investigate the reported presence of Indonesian terrorists in remote areas controlled by the MILF.