KASANANGAN, Philippines - Abdul Mohammed Katar picked up a rifle and joined the rebels when he was 15. He says he had little choice because economic prospects for young Muslim men in the Asian nation with the most Christians are so bleak that the best job offers often come from the guerrillas.
Much the same thinking led him to switch sides when a peace agreement with the government opened the door for some former rebels to join the Philippine army. Katar jumped at the opportunity, which he said didn't feel so much like a betrayal as doing the right thing for his family.
"Most Muslims are discriminated against, and they can't find work," says Katar, 28, a sniper who admits killing former comrades in his new role as army sergeant. "I feel good because now I have enough money to support my family and I can send my children to school."
About one in 10 rebels has joined government forces, but that still leaves tens of thousands of Muslim guerrillas, says Henry Pungutan, 32, a former rebel and current army sharpshooter.
"Most of my comrades are still up in the mountains; some of them have joined the Abu Sayyaf," he says, referring to a militant group linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
Despite its relatively small Muslim population, the Philippines has increasingly become an important front in the global war against terror. Soon after a car packed with explosives killed 191 people in the Indonesian resort of Bali, a spate of bombings racked Manila and the southern island of Mindanao, where most of the country's Muslims live among a population that is predominantly Roman Catholic.
But the front is wider than domestic issues. Many of al-Qaida's recent plots, including the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, have been traced back to terrorists who lived or worked in the Philippines. Since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan last year, radical Muslims with suspected ties to bin Laden are believed to be moving their jihad to Southeast Asia.
Radicals hope "to establish a fundamentalist Islamic republic comprised of several countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and parts of Thailand and Mindanao," says lawmaker Prospero A. Pichay Jr., chairman of the committee on national defense. "They want to use the bombings to weaken the resolve of these governments, to destroy the leadership of these governments and to incite the Muslim communities to take up arms against these republics."
Steeped in a history of armed uprisings, economic disparity and political disenfranchisement, this archipelago of some 7,000 islands has become a fertile breeding ground for foot soldiers fighting a holy war. In the last couple of years, bombings, kidnappings and battles have not only claimed lives but turned the Philippines into a country afraid of itself.
"For an average young Muslim man whose only future, being as ill equipped and poorly educated as he is, maybe a cargo handler in some port, joining the Abu Sayyaf is cool," says Congresswoman Imee R. Marcos, daughter of former dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos. "They give you Oakley sunglasses, a gun, radio equipment and you belong to a brotherhood. If you die, they believe you end up in the garden of earthly delights, so what's the problem?"
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has repeatedly denounced poverty as "the handmaiden of terrorism," but the Philippine government has been unsuccessful in solving the problem. In this dirt-poor Muslim area in Zamboanga City, the consequences of that failure are seen in broken shanties and battered lives. Village elders say as many as 90 percent of residents are unemployed.
"I have 14 children and 33 grandchildren," says 82-year-old Alpa Muallil At-Haj. "Only four of them have jobs, and they are living abroad."
All work is hard to come by, but Muslims say Christians are preferred candidates regardless of qualifications.
"My son is a licensed engineer, but when the employers look at his resume and see that he is Muslim, they just tell him to come back later," says a 52-year-old former guerrilla who did not want to give his name. "Two years later he still hasn't found anything, while less-deserving Christians managed to land jobs."
It is a situation repeated in Islamic communities across the country, Muslims say.
"That's why they join the rebels," says Shariff Jullabi, a former senior commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the country's biggest armed Muslim organization. It considers itself moderate compared with the Abu Sayyaf, a radical splinter group known more for its banditry than its philosophy. Although Jullabi broke with the MILF this summer to lead his own splinter group, he still boasts of an army of "100,000 mujahedeen."
"We don't have to recruit them; they recruit themselves," Jullabi says from his hide-out in the southern city of Zamboanga.
Officials don't buy that.
"We are a poor country - we have to admit that," says Gen. Narciso Abaya in Zamboanga, who assumed his post as southern command chief on the day of a department store bombing in April. "But being poor doesn't mean you can violate the law. There are countries poorer than us and they do not do terrorist activities, so what kind of justification is that?"
Officials argue that they have devoted financial resources to fight poverty in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao - which Manila set up in the mid-1990s to appease Muslim militants demanding a separate state in the south - but Muslim leaders there apparently failed to take advantage.
"We put in so many millions of dollars for economic development projects, but it went to waste because of corruption and mismanagement," Abaya says.
It's no wonder, authorities say, foreign militants have stepped up their recruiting in these poor Muslim neighborhoods.
Just up a dusty dirt path from Kasanangan village is the shuttered two-story building that once housed a charity organization run by Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of bin Laden. Officials suspect Khalifa used the International Islamic Relief Organization as a front to supply money to Philippine rebels and build terrorist networks.
In return, the indigenous groups are believed to be merging their own causes with those of the global terrorist campaigns.
"When the Abu Sayyaf kidnapped people in March 2000, their initial demand was for the release of the [1993] World Trade Center bombing mastermind, Ramzi Yousef," Abaya says.
The rebels, however, insist they have nothing to do with al-Qaida.
"We are not connected to the terrorist activities in the other parts of the world," Jullabi says. "Our objective is the regaining of our homeland."
Regardless, Philippine officials say they are fighting a two-pronged war.
"Whatever is the category of these groups, whether it's al-Qaida or a franchise of al-Qaida, we have to fight it," says Sen. Rodolfo G. Biazon. "But the solution may not just be military. We need to address the economic, social injustice and political roots of the problems."
The Philippine Muslims, known as Moros - derived from the Spanish for "Moor" - make up only about 5 percent of a country of 80 million. They bear a proud tradition as descendants of the Royal Sultanate of Sulu, an Islamic kingdom that ruled the seas long before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors.
"We do not consider ourselves Filipinos," Jullabi says. "Filipinos are those who surrendered to the Spaniards. We never surrendered."
The Moros have a long-standing culture of fierce resistance. At the turn of the last century, American colonial forces subdued the rest of the Philippines but failed to conquer the Muslim south.
Ching-Ching Ni is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.