By Manny Mogato MANILA, March 14 (Reuters) - Portions of tens of millions of dollars generated by drug use may be finding their way into the hands of communist and Muslim rebels in the Philippines, said the head of a U.S. anti-drug task force unit in Southeast Asia. Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft of the U.S. Joint Inter-Agency Task Force-West told Reuters said there were indications that secret laboratories for producing methamphetamine were now operating in areas where Maoist-led and Muslim rebels have a strong presence. "That's one of our biggest concerns," Zukunft told Reuters during a break in meetings with Filipino counterparts at the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), adding a significant portion of revenues in drug trade fund rebel activities. "It's not just drug users, it's the revenues that are generated by drug use. We do know it's in the tens of millions of dollars and there's a very sophisticated money-laundering scheme that goes with that." The U.S. government has been funding training and information exchange programmes with countries in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines to track where drugs are going and stop them. "It's much easier to stop them at the source than waiting for them to go into global distribution," said Zukunft, who is based at the U.S. Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. Dionisio Santiago, a former military chief who now heads PDEA, said rebels were believed to have turned to the illicit drug trade because the global war on terrorism had cut foreign fund inflows to Muslim militants and communist rebels. "We have been able to reduce the supply of methamphetamine in Manila because of the series of drug busts in several clandestine laboratories in the capital since 2005," Santiago told Reuters. "But, we've been getting reports new laboratories were being set up in remote areas in central Mindanao, near the hideouts of Muslim rebels." REBEL PROTECTION The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the largest Muslim rebel group in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic country in Southeast Asia, controls the vast wetlands in central Mindanao, where other Islamic militant groups are also known to be sheltering. Santiago said the shortage of methamphetamine supply has increased demand for marijuana, cultivated in the mountains in the northern Philippines. He said communist New People's Army (NPA) rebels were known to be controlling and protecting huge marijuana plantation sites in areas where they operate. "We still don't have estimates of how much money the NPAs get from marijuana growers in the mountain provinces," Santiago said, adding the plant was now exported to Australia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan although domestic consumption was increasing. The small militant group Abu Sayyaf, known to have links with Jemaah Islamiah and al Qaeda, has also started cashing in on the drug trade, controlling traffic of smuggled drugs from its base on Jolo island. Santiago described the island as the country's main gateway to ingredients in making methamphetamine in secret laboratories in the Muslim Mindanao region. Precursor chemicals for making methamphetamines, popularly known as "shabu" in the Philippines, were smuggled through Jolo from China by five huge transnational drug rings based in Taiwan and mainland China. Another popular substance, called ketamine, used commonly as an anaesthetic for horses, was also smuggled from India for local processing and re-exported to Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. "It's not popular here yet because ketamine is expensive," Santiago said, adding the drug, also known as Kit Kat or Vitamin K, was popular among middle-level executives in wealthier countries.
