Three policemen on duty take aim at the Tanjung Labian checkpoint. — Pictures by Saw Siow FengLAHAD
DATU, March 9 — Dense oil palm plantations and Sulu militants who can
easily pass off as locals are making mopping up operations difficult for
security forces sent from the Malay peninsula to end a month-long
incursion in the Sabah east coast.The soldiers and police commandos are more at home in the humid jungles of Peninsular Malaysia but they form the bulk of the security forces looking for the remaining group of 200-odd Filipino gunmen who landed on February 9 to claim Sabah for their Sulu sultan.
“To say that it is like finding a needle in a haystack doesn’t even begin to cover it,” a General Operations Force (GOF) police officer from Kuala Lumpur told The Malaysian Insider in the course of the Ops Daulat operations to flush out the militants.
“They could look like anyone,” he added, describing the tanned Filipino gunmen who share the same bloodline as some of the locals in Sabah — a state unique for its racial and cultural diversity that is seen as a blessing and a curse, with 28 per cent of the population comprising mostly Filipinos and Indonesians.
The vast Felda Sahabat oil palm plantations here are four times the size of the federal capital of Kuala Lumpur but the stragglers of the Sulu sultanate are surrounded in the four square kilometres containing Kampung Tanduo and Kampung Tanjung Batu.
The armed conflict has continued despite an aerial assault last Tuesday that devastated the seaside Kampung Tanduo, where the gunmen first landed last month.
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