Philippine rebels threaten U.S. troops

MANILA, Philippines -- Communist guerrillas on Monday renewed their threat against U.S. troops on training missions in the Philippines, saying the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq prove they can be killed despite their superior military power.

The Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People's Army, accused the U.S. government of attempting to crush their insurgency by supplying weapons and training to Filipino soldiers. The rebel army marks its 36th anniversary on Tuesday.

The United States has about 100 soldiers in the Philippines as part of annual training exercises. Washington considers the communist rebels a terrorist organization, although there have been no attacks on American soldiers in recent years.

"The NPA is ... prepared to take the necessary actions against these foreign troops who, in fact, engage in terrorism under the pretext of anti-terrorism," the Communist Party said in a statement.

The guerrillas praised Iraqis for "their heroic struggle for having already killed in only two years' time more than 1,500 U.S. troops" and wounding thousands of others.

"They can be made to bleed and die on the ground, as now demonstrated by the Iraqi people and previously by the Vietnamese and other peoples," the statement said.

Later Monday, about 100 masked Communist Party members briefly paraded in a Manila street with placards saying "Armed revolution is the answer to poverty." They scattered before police arrived.

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Buenaventura Pascual belittled the rebel threat as an "empty boast," saying the guerrillas did not have the capability to take on the military or American soldiers, who have their own security shield.

"They can only take on very remote military detachments and police stations, which they think have less chances of repelling their treacherous attacks," he said.

He noted that American troops recently traveled to southeastern Quezon province, where the guerrillas are active, to undertake humanitarian projects.

Last year, the rebels suspended peace talks with the Philippine government to protest Manila's refusal to push U.S. and European officials to remove the guerrillas from their lists of terrorist organizations.

The military estimates that as of last year, the NPA had 8,240 men. Despite military offensives, the Communist Party said it has a presence in nearly 70 of the Philippines' 79 provinces.

In the coming years, the guerrillas said they would focus their struggle on seizing arms from government troops, including those supplied by the United States. They also threatened to deploy "hit squads" in towns and cities "to deliver lethal actions" against those who assault their activists.

"They also threatened to deploy "hit squads" in towns and cities "to deliver lethal actions" against those who assault their activists."

Well, it seems that the Philli government has much more efficient "hit squads" that are in fact rather good marksmen. Notice in Cebu city as well as Davao city over the last few months, these government hit squads do a nice job of cleaning up the riff-raff there.

And although the Philli press has to take the PC way...and decry them, the public actually supports these "off-duty cops".

It's the group that is backed by Saddam Hussein:

From another article:

As they might have expected, they discovered several calls to and from Abu Sayyaf leaders. But another call got their attention. Seventeen hours after the attack that took the life of SFC Jackson, the cell phone was used to place a call to the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, Hisham Hussein. It was not Hussein's only contact with Abu Sayyaf.
"He was surveilled, and we found out he was in contact with Abu Sayyaf and also pro-Iraqi demonstrators," says a Philippine government source, who continued, "[Philippine intelligence] was able to monitor their cell phone calls. [Abu Sayyaf leaders] called him right after the bombing. They were always talking."
An analysis of Iraqi embassy phone records by Philippine authorities showed that Hussein had been in regular contact with Abu Sayyaf leaders both before and after the attack that killed SFC Jackson. Andrea Domingo, immigration commissioner for the Philippines, said Hussein ran an "established network" of terrorists in the country. [Hisham] Hussein had also met with members of the New People's Army, a Communist opposition group on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist groups, in his office at the embassy. According to a Philippine government official, the Philippine National Police uncovered documents in a New People's Army compound that indicate the Iraqi embassy had provided funding for the group. Hisham Hussein and two other Iraqi embassy employees were ordered out of the Philippines on February 14, 2003.
------- "Saddam's Philippines Terror Connection," by Stephen F. Hayes, Weekly Standard, 03/18/2006

NPA: Gloria will pay if hostage dies Manila Times ^ | July 11, 2004 | Karl B. Kaufman

Aside from that, al qaeda and Iraq backed another terrorist group called Abu Sayyaf. The founder of Abu Sayyaf is bin Laden's brother-in-law, and leaders of Abu Sayyaf made no secret about getting funding from Iraq to the tune of about $20,000 a year.

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