Soldiers battle Muslim rebels after air strike

GOVERNMENT troops engaged Muslim extremists on a remote southern island on Friday where a day earlier three of Southeast Asia’s top terror suspects were killed in a USbacked air strike, the Philippine Army said on Friday.

Soldiers who approached a bombed area on the outskirts of a small village on Jolo island, the capital of Sulu province in the country’s southern Mindanao region, after the raid faced dogged resistance from surviving militants, regional military spokesman Lt. Col. Randolph Cabangbang said.

“There is intermittent fire, the area is not yet secured,” Cabangbang told GMA television during a telephone interview.

The troops had moved into the scene of the strike in an effort to retrieve the bodies of the three senior militants who were killed, as well as to take on the others who survived

Thursday’s aerial assault.

The military said that 15 members of the al-qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organizations were killed in the air raid, which followed months of surveillance on the sparsely populated and isolated hinterland of Jolo.

Cabangbang gave no indication as to the scale of Friday’s fighting, but military chiefs on Thursday said that about 30 militants were at the scene when the bombings began.

The military said that it had targeted, and killed, Malaysian Zulkifli bin Abdul Hir, alias Marwan, one of the United States’ most-wanted terror suspects with a $ 5- million bounty on his head from the US government.

Zulkifli was one of Jemaah Isla- miyah’s top leaders and a bombmaking expert who has been hiding out in southern Philippines since 2003, according to the US State Department.

Also reported killed was Singaporean Mohammad Ali, alias Muawiyah, another Islamiyah leader who has also been hiding in the Philippines since the group killed 202 people in a series of bomb attacks on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002.

The third senior militant reported killed was Filipino Abu Pula, also known as Doctor Abu or Umbra Jumdail, one of the core leaders of the Abu Sayyaf that is blamed for the worst terrorist attacks in the Philippines.

The military claimed the killings dealt a major blow to the capabilities of the two terror groups, particularly their ability to strike in the Philippines.

Col. Arnufo Burgos, the spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, on Thursday said that the US military provided intelligence that helped in the success on the bombing raid.

A rotating force of 600 US Special Forces has been stationed in Mindanao since 2002 to help train local troops in combating Islamic militants.

The US forces are only allowed to advise Filipino soldiers and are banned from playing a combat role.

The commander of the Western Mindanao Command, Maj. Gen. Noel Coballes, also on Friday said that government forces were on a “heightened security level” even as he admitted that none of the bodies of the three most wanted terror leaders and their 12 men who were killed on Thursday had been recovered or retrieved.

Coballes said that the bodies of Marwan, Muawiyah and Umbra and those of their followers could no longer be retrieved as they had been mangled by the bombs dropped by military planes.

There were reports that the three terrorist leaders were not among those who perished but the command commander maintained that “they were among the dead.”

Coballes said that the death of the three terrorist leaders would greatly affect the terrorist organization in Mindanao, but added that the successful air strike did not mean that it was the end of terror attacks in the country.

He added that in preparing for possible retaliation from the terrorists, they had secured all potential targets of terror attacks, particularly population centers.