AFTER weeks of no fighting, government soldiers are slowly moving in on the Abu Sayyaf bandits’ positions in the strife-torn island province of Basilan, officials said Thursday.

Marine Brig. Gen. Juancho Sabban, commander of Joint Task Force Thunder, said intelligence agents are confirming the locations of the bandits.

“We are cooking-up something. Our intelligence [people] was pinpointing their exact locations,” Sabban told defense reporters in a telephone-patched conference in Camp Aguinaldo.

He said all their intelligence operations are being done to validate and confirm the location of the Abu Sayyaf to prepare the troops for “surgical strikes.”

The last engagement between government soldiers and Abu Sayyaf bandits took place late last month when troops shelled the bandit group’s positions in Tipo-Tipo and Ungkaya Pukan towns.

The military has shifted tactics in Basilan recently from combat-heavy driven operations to an intelligence-driven one to avoid heavy casualties, especially among civilians “because we don’t want the fighting to spread to other places like Isabela City and Lamitan town,” Sabban said pointed out.

Heavy fighting between Marines and Abu Sayyaf members in Ungkaya Pukan on August 18 resulted in the death of 16 soldiers and at least 40 bandits.

Since early July, the battles in Basilan, the birthplace of the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf, have been limited to several villages in Tipo-Tipo, Ungkaya Pukan and Al-Barkah towns.

Fighting in Basilan started when a Marine contingent was ambushed by a group of Moro rebels and Abu Sayyaf bandits in a remote village in Al-Barkah town on July 10 where 14 Marines were killed. Of these, 10 were beheaded and nine others were wounded. The beheading elicited massive public outrage.

On August 18 at least 15 Marines and as many as 40 Abu Sayyaf bandits were killed after government troops overran an Abu Sayyaf camp in Barangay Selangum, Ungkaya Pukan.