The Road to Peace; Rebels in the southern Philippines wrestle with the character of their insurgency.

Byline: Joe Cochrane

Al-Haj Murad Ebrahim is what you might call an old-school revolutionary. The leader of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has spent three decades in the jungles of the troubled southern Philippine region of Mindanao, battling to carve out an independent state for its downtrodden Muslim population. But more recently the MILF has tacitly supported terrorist bombings of civilian targets by foreign Islamic jihadists, an unsavory alliance in the post-September 11 world. As he prepares for formal peace talks with the Philippine government, Murad faces a stark choice--either steer the MILF back to its nationalist roots or drive it into the arms of international terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. "I think he's prepared to have a negotiated settlement with the government," says Silvestre Afable, Manila's chief peace negotiator, "and has decided that the MILF will have nothing to do with terrorists."

The predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines, not to mention the rest of Southeast Asia, can only hope he's right. The MILF has been accused of protecting training camps in its territory run by Jemaah Islamiah, or JI--a regional terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda--for nearly a decade. According to U.S. and Filipino officials in Manila, the Mindanao camps have been nothing short of a mini-Afghanistan, providing JI a sanctuary within a lawless region to train recruits and plan operations against the United States and its regional allies. Other terrorist organizations, including kidnapping specialists Abu Sayyaf, are also believed to be training there.

Graduates of the camps have been linked to some of the world's worst terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the Bali bombings two years ago that killed 202 people and the suspicious sinking of a ferry near Manila in February that killed 116. Bomb expert Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, who played a role in several bombings in the Philippines and Indonesia in 2002, is believed to have worked as an instructor in the camps in 1996. (Al-Ghozi was killed by soldiers in Mindanao last October.) Analysts say the camps are giving JI--which has been battered by hundreds of arrests in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia since the Bali attacks--a second wind. "As long as JI is able to regenerate new recruits, they will be a threat," says Rohan Gunaratna, a regional terrorism analyst.

MILF leaders vehemently deny the presence of both JI and the training camps in their territory, and have publicly denounced the 9/11 attacks and all forms of terrorism. But they also acknowledge that some "rogue" field commanders might be in cahoots with the group. "If the top leadership is not aware of these training camps," insists Ghazali Jaafar, a senior member of the group's central committee, "then the MILF leadership has nothing to do with it."

Philippine authorities say they have evidence to the contrary. A Philippine military-intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that about 100 recruits from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Middle East are currently training in "a handful" of camps in the remote Mount Cararao region in Mindanao's Lanao del Sur province, which is in MILF territory. Gunaratna says two camps are specifically designated for Arab fighters: Camp Vietnam, founded by Omar al-Faruq, a Kuwaiti linked to Al Qaeda and JI, and Camp Palestine, which was recently closed.

The United States, which has mercilessly gone after terrorist cells and training camps in eastern Afghanistan, thinks peace talks have a better chance of shutting down the Philippines camps than airstrikes do. "Without a successful peace agreement, the region will continue to be marked by a climate of lawlessness in which terrorism can thrive," notes a recent report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. Both Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the MILF leadership have been dragging their feet on resuming talks, which Malaysia has offered to ...