The Quiet Victory: 25 Years in Mindanao

In the months after 9/11, Green Berets were in the southern Philippines to help take on an al-Qaeda-linked force more than 1,000 strong. Two decades later, roughly 20 terrorist fighters remained.

by Jose Campos

The Green Berets moved through the jungle, cutting through undergrowth in the ungoverned space where violent terrorist groups held sway. They had come to help the Philippine military take apart Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist militant group tied to al-Qaeda that kidnapped civilians, bombed cities and moved through the islands and mountains of the south. The mission would become one of the quieter successes of the war on terror. Around the beginning of the millennium, Abu Sayyaf had more than 1,000 fighters; two decades later, Philippine officials put its remaining strength at roughly 20.

The campaign was Operation Enduring Freedom–Philippines, one of the first American military efforts launched after September 11. While attention shifted toward Afghanistan and later Iraq, American Special Operations forces in the Philippines settled into a campaign that would stretch across years. They worked alongside Filipino forces against militants who knew the terrain, had local networks and could disappear across an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands.

Old Ground

The jungle the Green Berets entered in 2002 had seen kingdoms, alliances and conflict for centuries, in a region whose people had long histories of trade, weaponry, seafaring, and exploration. In modern times, conflict followed the Spanish-American War. More recently, the Moro National Liberation Front had waged an armed campaign for Muslim autonomy in Mindanao since 1972, while the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People’s Army had waged a rural insurgency since 1969. Abu Sayyaf emerged from that landscape in the early 1990s, breaking from the MNLF and embracing a harder jihadist ideology in which kidnapping and bombing became signatures.

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American soldiers knew the Philippines could be deadly ground. One of the most revered Green Berets, Colonel James “Nick” Rowe, went there in the 1980s as part of the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group, helping train Filipino forces against the New People’s Army.

Rowe had survived five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before escaping his Viet Cong captors, then went on to help develop the Army’s survival, evasion, resistance and escape training program. On April 21, 1989, an NPA hit team ambushed Rowe’s car in Quezon City. The gunmen fired 21 rounds from an M16 and a .45-caliber pistol, one of them penetrating the vehicle’s armor and killing him. The NPA later claimed responsibility.

Thirteen years later, another generation of American Special Forces soldiers arrived in a country where advising local forces could still put an American directly in an insurgent’s sights.

Abu Sayyaf had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 1997, and its founder and early leadership had established ties with al-Qaeda. Jemaah Islamiyah, the Indonesian network behind the 2002 Bali bombings, also had connections in the southern Philippines.

Closing the Ground

In 2002, Filipino forces aided by American intelligence and training located Abu Sabaya, one of Abu Sayyaf’s most notorious commanders and a central figure in its kidnapping operations. Philippine forces caught up with him at sea, where he was killed in a gunbattle.

Removing Sabaya did not break Abu Sayyaf. Other commanders remained, cells continued operating and the organization retained the ability to kill. The pressure instead accumulated as leaders were killed or captured, networks were disrupted, and Philippine units became better at finding militants who once could move through remote islands and jungle terrain with relative freedom.

The Americans brought training, intelligence and specialized capabilities to that effort while Filipino troops carried out the fighting.

Over time, the militants found themselves operating in a steadily smaller world. The campaign reached places where Abu Sayyaf and other armed groups had benefited from isolation and a weak government presence. American and Filipino efforts included roads, medical programs and other projects alongside military operations, giving security forces greater access to communities where militants had once enjoyed room to maneuver. The change was gradual, but it mattered: areas where armed groups had operated openly became increasingly difficult to use as sanctuary.

The Americans remained targets throughout that process. On October 2, 2002, a motorcycle bomb tore through a market district in Zamboanga City, killing Sergeant First Class Mark Wayne Jackson of the 1st Special Forces Group and three Filipino civilians. Jackson had been training Filipino troops in counterterrorism operations against Abu Sayyaf, and another American soldier was wounded badly enough to be evacuated from the country.

Investigators later tied the bombing to an Abu Sayyaf commander operating from Sulu. Jackson’s death showed the risk carried by American troops even when they were not leading assaults themselves. Abu Sayyaf knew who was helping the forces hunting its commanders, and the distinction between adviser and combatant offered little protection from a bomb.

The campaign continued through changing American deployments and changing governments. Philippine units kept pursuing militant leaders and cells while U.S. personnel supplied training, intelligence and other support.

Marawi

The next major test came in 2017, when ISIS-aligned militants seized Marawi on Mindanao. Fighters occupied buildings and neighborhoods, forcing Philippine troops into sustained urban combat far removed from the jungle operations that had characterized much of the earlier campaign. The battle lasted five months as Filipino forces fought to retake the city. American surveillance and advisory support operated behind them.

The battlefield had changed dramatically since Green Berets first entered Basilan in 2002, and Abu Sayyaf was now only one part of a broader collection of militant organizations and loyalties in the region. Yet the basic relationship remained recognizable: American capabilities supported Philippine troops doing the fighting.

Marawi also provided a hard measure of what had changed during the intervening years. The Philippine military confronted militants entrenched inside a city and ultimately retook it after months of combat. The jihadist threat had evolved, but so had the force facing it.

Twenty

By 2023, Philippine officials estimated that Abu Sayyaf had been reduced to roughly 20 fighters, down from more than 1,000 around the beginning of the millennium. Officials said the group had taken no hostages in Mindanao during 2022.

Arturo Rojas, head of the Philippine military’s Western Mindanao Command, described Abu Sayyaf as “a thing of the past.”

That did not mean violence had disappeared from the southern Philippines, nor did it mean every militant organization had been destroyed. New groups and allegiances had emerged, as Marawi demonstrated. But the Abu Sayyaf that confronted the Americans and Filipinos in 2002 – the organization that kidnapped civilians, bombed cities, ruled through fear and moved fighters through the southern islands – no longer possessed anything approaching its former reach.

Twenty-five years after September 11, OEF-P stands apart from the American wars that dominated the era. There was no fall of a capital or surrender ceremony, and much of the campaign unfolded far from American attention. More than 1,000 Abu Sayyaf fighters had been in the field when the Americans arrived. Two decades later, roughly 20 remained.

Jose Campos writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.