“They Are Very Scary”

Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist organization in the Philippines, isn’t shy about owning up to its dirty work. “We did it!” spokesman Abu Sulaiman crowed to a local radio station a few hours after a bomb on a ferry killed more than 100 passengers last February. At the time, Philippine officials scoffed at the claim because they didn’t think the group had the ability to pull off such a deadly attack. (It wasn’t until eight months later that the authorities acknowledged that Abu Sayyaf was indeed responsible.) Sulaiman didn’t want to be taken so lightly last week. On Valentine’s Day, after two bombs exploded in the southern cities of Davao and General Santos, Sulaiman was again on the radio, asserting that Abu Sayyaf’s “gallant warriors of Islam” were behind the blasts. But his last words were: “There is one more to come.” About 20 minutes later, a bomb went off on a bus in Makati, Metro Manila’s financial center. The toll for the day: 12 dead and more than 100 wounded.

The Philippines is going through a violent patch. Apart from the bombings, intense fighting has erupted in the mountainous south between the military and Abu Sayyaf rebels, who have joined with renegades of the Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.), a Muslim guerrilla group that once agitated for an independent state. Abu Sayyaf, moreover, has promised further attacks in urban areas. “We will find ways and means to inflict more harm,” Sulaiman told the radio host.

Before the bombing of the ferry, Abu Sayyaf was known as little more than a criminal gang that kidnapped people, particularly foreigners, for ransom. But under new leader Khadaffy Janjalani, a militant who learned his trade in the mid-1990s in camps in Afghanistan run by al-Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf has returned to its original goal: establishing an Islamic state through jihad. According to Philippine and regional intelligence sources, Janjalani is strengthening ties with not just M.N.L.F. rebels but also Jemaah Islamiah, the network of Islamic militants blamed for the 2002 Bali bombings and which regional security officials say is al-Qaeda’s proxy in Southeast Asia. “The ferry bombing was the worst terrorist attack in Asia after Bali,” points out Zachary Abuza, author of Tentacles of Terror, a book on al-Qaeda’s influence in Southeast Asia. “Now we have Valentine’s Day. These guys are back and they are very scary.”