Veteran Moro guerrillas heading to Sabah

The fighters are veteran members of the Moro National Liberation Front and some have slipped through the security forces.

MANILA: Battle-hardened Moro guerrillas have sailed from Mindanao to reinforce followers of Sulu Sultan Jamalul Kiram III who are battling Malaysian forces in Sabah, one of their leaders said Wednesday.

The fighters are veteran members of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) who waged a decades-long insurgency against the Philippine government before signing a 1996 peace pact, Muhajab Hashim told AFP.

“Many have slipped through the security forces. They know the area like the back of their hands because they trained there in the past,” Hashim told AFP.

“We are expecting more of them to join (the fighting) even if our official instruction is for them to refrain from going.”

If the claim is true, the Moro fighters will be engaging Malaysian security forces with little or no experience in warfare.

Hashim could not say how many MNLF fighters had managed to slip through naval cordons set up by the Philippines and Malaysia, but said “thousands” had earlier expressed interest in joining.

Hashim is chairman of the MNLF’s Islamic Command Council overseeing all of the group’s armed forces, which were meant to disarm as part of the 1996 peace pact but never fully complied.

He said that although MNLF leaders had not officially instructed their men to sail to Malaysia, they fully supported the sultan’s efforts to reclaim the Malaysian state of Sabah as his territory.

“MNLF fighters are adherents of the sultan, we are followers. So there is more than an alliance,” he said. “We feel very strongly against the attacks against our brothers from Sulu.”

Malaysian security forces launched a major offensive on Tuesday to end a three-week standoff between followers of Kiram that has left at least 27 people dead.

However, the sultan’s aides said in Manila that their followers, believed to originally number between 100 and 300, had escaped Tuesday’s attacks.

The MNLF was founded by Muslim scholar Nur Misuari to fight for a Muslim homeland in Mindanao in the late 1960s, and had once received support from Malaysia.

-AFP