Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

442 • MOROCCAN ISLAMIC COMBATANT GROUPclaims and agreed instead to run as a candidate of Ramos’s politicalparty for the leadership of the four-province autonomous zone. ManyMLF members regarded this as a sellout, and the breakaway MILF,numbering 300 to 500 fighters, launched sporadic attacks againstthe army around Cotabato in late November 1996. By early February1997 the government of Fidel Ramos was holding talks with theseparatist MILF, which the Abu Sayyaf Group attempted to sabotageby its murder of a Catholic bishop, Benjamin de Jesús, outside thecathedral in Jolo Town. The original MLF has become less activeas many of its militants have defected to the rival Abu Sayyaf andMILF groups. The group’s last known attack was on 27 November2001 on a Philippine army base causing more than 100 deaths; theattack was ordered by Misuari, who had grown dissatisfied with theaccommodation with the Philippine government and who apparentlywas seeking to reassert some leadership in the Moro independencemovement and to win back the members of the breakaway MILF tothe MLF fold.MOROCCAN ISLAMIC COMBATANT GROUP (MICG). TheGroupe Islamique Combattant Marocain (MICG) is an Islamic fundamentalistgroup seeking to create an Islamic state in Moroccoand also supports al Qa’eda’s terrorist campaign against the UnitedStates and its European allies. The group was formed in the 1990sfrom Moroccan volunteers who fought alongside the Mujahideenagainst the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Its members, whosenumbers are not known, trained in al Qa’eda camps in Afghanistan.The group has members not only in Morocco but also in Belgium,Denmark, Egypt, France, Great Britain, and Turkey. Members of thegroup belonging to a faction known as the Salafiyya Jihadiyya arebelieved to have been involved in a 16 May 2003 attack on Westerntourists and a Jewish community center in Casablanca that killed 45people and injured more than 100 others, as well as in the 11 March2004 Madrid railway bombings. In October 2005 the U.S. StateDepartment designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization,and the British Home Office designated the MICG as a ProscribedGroup under the Terrorism Act of 2000.MOSCOW THEATER SIEGE. During the evening of 23 October2002, about 42 Chechen terrorists, of which 19 were females, seizedmore than 800 hostages in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. These