U.S.-backed Philippine marines swept through the jungles of Sulu on a pre-dawn scouting mission in late July and came upon a camp of kidnappers, terrorists and bandits.
After a deadly five-hour firefight, the marines took the hideout, U.S. special operations forces treated casualties and a terrorist leader with a $1 million U.S. bounty on his head fled back into the green wilderness.
That game of cat-and-mouse has played out for nearly a decade in the southern Philippines, where the United States opened a front in the war against terrorism shortly after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and 17 servicemembers have died in the effort to root out al-Qaida-linked terrorism networks in a violence-plagued region that has vexed Manila for decades.
Now, military leaders and experts say the assistance operations have been widely successful in eliminating the threat of international terrorism. But the way out of the fight remains unclear.
With Osama bin Laden dead, the Iraq War wrapping up and a drawdown looming in Afghanistan, the U.S. commitment in the southern Philippines remains open-ended and the country’s independence from military aid appears as elusive as terrorist rebels who disappear into the Sulu jungle.
