Rumbles in the Jungle

The U.S. war on terror, Bush famously vowed, will take many years and span the globe. Already it has put American troops in harm's way in Afghanistan—and now the southern Philippines, where last week an American MH-47 Chinook helicopter went down in the shark-infested waters between southern Negros and northern Mindanao after ferrying soldiers and supplies to fight on the small island of Basilan. As of last weekend, three crew members' bodies had been recovered and seven more were unaccounted for. That this second front in the war on terror has turned costly was to be expected. The U.S. is helping Philippine soldiers stomp out Abu Sayyaf, a kidnap-extortion gang on Basilan holding two Americans and one Filipino hostage. The gang once had ties to al-Qaeda, notably through Ramzi Yousef, who tried destroying the World Trade Center in February 1993 and two years later planned the Manila-based Bojinka Plot to blow 11 airliners out of the sky over the Pacific. Since then, Abu Sayyaf's links have atrophied. At this point, cracking down on Abu Sayyaf, as beneficial as it will be to local security, will likely have little impact on eradicating global terrorism.

In another part of the Philippines, however, there are increasing signs of a very real terrorist threat and much fresher links to Osama bin Laden's organization. TIME has uncovered evidence linking two Palestinians and one Jordanian, who are a part of an al-Qaeda cell, with members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest separatist rebel faction in the country. The three were picked up last Nov. 23, their arrests barely making the newspapers. All three are being held at Camp Creme in Manila, officially for violating immigration laws. At least one member of this cell, Ahmed Abed Uthman Masrie, according to high-ranking law enforcement officials, was a roommate of Ramzi Yousef. Currently languishing in jail in the U.S., Yousef is a known al-Qaeda operative. It has now become increasingly clear the three currently detained in the Philippines were members of the same terrorist cell.

In the small community of Simuay Crossing on the Philippines' southern island of Mindanao, Mohammad Sabri Selamah fit in just fine. He spoke three local dialects, had lived in Mindanao for almost a decade and was raising four kids with his Philippine Muslim wife. Selamah, a Palestinian carrying Iraqi travel documents, worked as the head teacher at a Koranic recitation center attached to a local orphanage. Datu Tucao Mastura, mayor of the nearby municipality of Sultaan Kudarat, says, "There was never any suggestion he was doing anything except his work at the school."

Until the morning last November when Philippine troops backed by armored vehicles sealed off the recitation center and orphanage under cover of predawn darkness. Shortly after 5:30 a.m. an antiterrorist task force burst into the school to seize a shaken, protesting Selamah. (According to military sources, they also found passports of at least five different nationalities, at least one firearm and documents on explosives and bombmaking.) Three hours later in Manila, two apartments were raided, yielding firearms, explosives, time fuses, manuals on explosives, sketches of targets and two other non-Filipinos: Masrie, a 32-year-old Palestinian born in Lebanon, and Hussam al-Deen Hassan Ali, a 36-year-old Kuwaiti-born Jordanian.

The arrest of the three men in November raises lots of questions. Was it to pre-empt a planned terror wave in the Philippines? How far beyond the three arrested does the cell extend? What exactly was Selamah's role in the cell? Philippine officials won't specifically say. But some analysts believe Selamah acted as an al-Qaeda recruiter and facilitated the movement of operatives in and out of the Philippines via the country's maritime "back-door" border with Malaysia and Indonesia.

Selamah arrived in the Philippines in or around 1992. Philippine intelligence sources believe him to have been a close associate of Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, brother-in-law and Philippines point man of Osama bin Laden. A veteran of the Afghan jihad, Khalifa is believed to have first visited the southern Philippines in 1988, setting up Islamic charities and a rattan business while recruiting Muslim youth to fight in Afghanistan. In Cotabato, his Islamic Relief Organization (IRO) opened offices in town opposite the bishop's residence. Embarrassingly for the MILF—which has angrily denied links with international terror—Khalifa's associate Selamah had been in regular touch with the Front. Reports from local sources, including some MILF commanders, point to the Palestinian Koranic scholar as having visited the MILF's main base at Camp Abubakar on several occasions before it fell in July 2000 to the Philippine army. Since then he is understood to have been in phone contact with MILF vice chairman for political affairs Ghazali Jafaar and other Front members.

Both of Selamah's alleged colleagues in terror are also longtime residents with local wives and children. Masrie came to the Philippines in 1990 to study computer programming. In late 1994 he married. By then, according to Philippine intelligence reports, he had linked up with Ramzi Yousef who was in the Philippines between late 1994 and January 1995 training Abu Sayyaf on Basilan and later hatching the Bojinka Plot. That plot got busted on Jan. 6, 1995, when a chemical fire broke out in one of the bombmakers' apartments. Yousef fled Manila but was eventually picked up in Pakistan and sent for trial in the U.S. Masrie was detained in a general crackdown but was subsequently released. He left the Philippines for the first half of 1996, ostensibly looking for work in Lebanon. But since his return, he had worked for various employment agencies. The young Palestinian was also in contact with Selamah. Intelligence sources tell TIME one of the last cell-phone calls made by Selamah before his arrest was to Masrie in Manila. Ali, a mechanical engineer by training, has worked in the Philippines since 1985 as a small-time business and building contractor. Under surveillance by Philippine intelligence for some time, Ali was also in touch with Selamah. He sent him sim cards for a mobile phone by courier.

Intelligence sources in Manila believe that Selamah was already in the al-Qaeda cell at the time of the Bojinka Plot, and has apparently become Khalifa's successor as al-Qaeda's point man in the insurgency-wracked south. Intelligence analysts tell TIME that while al-Qaeda assisted in the training of Abu Sayyaf in the mid-90s, bin Laden's network was closely monitoring the MILF as a larger and better organized vehicle for Islamic revolution. In the second half of the '90s the MILF, under the leadership of its chairman Hashim Salamat, was also developing its own contacts with Islamist and overtly jihadi groups across Southeast Asia and beyond. Indeed, today the MILF has emerged as a central player in the perennially murky web of underground Islamism in Southeast Asia. Since at least 1996 the MILF jungle camps are believed to have played host to several hundred jihadis from the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia. This new evidence points to even stronger ties between MILF members and al-Qaeda.

The big question now being debated is whether the MILF has been importing terrorism as a matter of policy, or whether rogue elements have taken matters into their own hands. "The MILF is a loose collection of commanders and warlords, political leaders, religious people and others," says a Western diplomat. "There are certainly personal connections with Indonesia, Malaysia and the Middle East, but to see Hashim Salamat and the central committee as part of a network of terror around the world—I think the record is less clear there." The MILF is not Southeast Asia's version of the Taliban or the I.R.A.—not yet anyway.