Eight members of a group of Philippine militants have been killed in clashes with security forces in the nation’s south, the military said yesterday.
Thirteen members of a counterterrorism task force were also wounded in the fighting with the Abu Sayyaf group on the remote island of Jolo on Friday, Philippine military spokesman Ensign Chester Ramos said.
He said the eight Abu Sayyaf dead were followers of one-armed militant Radullan Sahiron, who has a US$1 million bounty on his head put up by the US government, which considers the group a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Ramos said Sahiron’s group of about 100 gunmen had been skirmishing with the counterterrorist task force near the Jolo town of Patikul over the past week, during which six other soldiers were earlier wounded.
Abu Sayyaf, set up with seed funds from al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, has been blamed for many of the deadliest militant attacks in the Philippines, including the 2004 firebombing of a ferry on Manila Bay that claimed more than 100 lives.
The group, mainly based in Muslim-populated areas in the southern Philippines, has also been involved in high-profile kidnappings of foreign tourists and Christian missionaries.
Another key leader of the group of several hundred militants posted video footage of himself and other gunmen last year pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
US military advisers have been providing training and intelligence input on Jolo and nearby areas since 2002 to Philippine troops fighting Abu Sayyaf.
The latest violence comes after 44 police commandos were killed by other Muslim guerrilla groups in another area of the southern Philippines last month while on a mission to catch two top militants — Malaysian Zulkifli bin Hir and Filipino Abdul Basit Usman.
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