They are schoolchildren, teachers and a group of mostly European holiday makers -- true innocents who have been caught for weeks in a pair of terrifying kidnappings in the lawless jungles of the southern Philippines.
Their captors, a small army of separatist bandits, have herded them up mountains and down riverbeds, to the sound of gunfire from pursuing Philippine troops. Last weekend, as government troops closed in on one group, the kidnappers executed four Filipino captives, including a Roman Catholic priest.
With the government taking a hard line and the kidnappers making wild threats and even wilder demands, there seems, for the moment, little hope of freedom for the hungry and frightened hostages.
The longest-held of the groups includes a dozen children and teachers, the last of about 50 people kidnapped from two schoolhouses on March 20. When 15 children and teachers were rescued last weekend, they described beatings, torture and abuse.
There are 21 people in the second group, kidnapped from a nearby Malaysian resort island on Easter Sunday. In addition to local workers, they include two South Africans, a Lebanese, three Germans, two Finns and two French travelers. Although the kidnappers recently said two of those hostages had died, emissaries who visited today said all were alive.
On a videotape made by a local journalist one week ago, foreigners in the second group said that they were not being treated badly but that they were sick and hungry. In tears, they pleaded for their freedom.
The hostage-taking is as complex as it is seemingly senseless, the full expression of a lawless world of pirates, smugglers and warlords, where kidnapping for ransom is a business and religious wars are fought by throwing bombs into markets and churches.
For nearly 30 years, various separatist groups have battled the government on the island of Mindanao, some 500 miles south of Manila. The conflict has taken as many as 120,000 lives and has helped to keep the island of 17 million people one of the poorest areas in the Philippines.
In this largely Roman Catholic nation of 74 million people, the Muslims of Mindanao have never been assimilated and have lived -- for four centuries -- in continuing conflict with the island's Christians.
The kidnappings are the work of a fundamentalist splinter group called Abu Sayyaf, or ''Bearer of the Sword'' in Arabic, a group of as few as 200 fighters whose founder was trained in Libya and fought in Afghanistan. It is a group whose trademark is bloodshed rather than policy -- it is known for kidnappings, church bombings and the massacre of 53 people in 1995 -- and it counts other Islamic groups, as well as Christians, among its enemies.
''The Abu Sayyaf are bandits masquerading as religious fundamentalists, giving Muslims a bad name,'' said Col. Hilario Atendido, a military spokesman.
The current standoff began when the children and teachers were seized six weeks ago, along with the priest, from two schools on the small island of Basilan, in the Sulu Sea, where pirates and bandits have held sway for centuries.
At first the kidnappers seemed to be demanding certain fishing rights and a large sum of money. Then they insisted that a popular action-movie actor, Robin Padilla, act as a negotiator. He posed for photographs with them and won the release of two hostages. Then, in what seemed to be an attempt to gain support from Islamic militants abroad, they demanded that the United States release Ramzi Yousef, who is serving a 240-year sentence for the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.
When the president of the Philippines, Joseph Estrada, brusquely rejected that demand, they announced that they had beheaded two hostages, a claim that is widely doubted here. They have since threatened to behead some of their foreign hostages if the government does not withdraw its troops.
On April 22, the army launched a major ground and air assault on the Abu Sayyaf camp deep in the jungles of Basilan. One day later, six men with AK-47 assault rifles landed in a motor launch on the tiny Malaysian island of Sipadan, an exclusive diving resort with a coral reef that the explorer Jacques Cousteau once called ''one of the 10 wonders of the underwater world.''
The kidnappers arrived at dinner time, bursting into a dining hall and shouting, in English and Malay, ''Be quiet or we will shoot you all!''
An American couple escaped but the other tourists, along with a dozen local workers, were herded onto the boat and taken one hour across the sea to the island of Jolo, some 50 miles from Basilan island.
Suddenly, the age-old bloodletting of Mindanao was an international affair. Foreign governments began to press the Philippines to tread gently, but the government has taken a hard line.
''The military will never retreat,'' said Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado. ''If the military withdraws, the Abu Sayyaf will be in control.''
So the foreigners -- along with the local schoolchildren and their teachers -- find themselves pawns in a nightmare of ancient hatreds and rivalries, strange foreign creatures who cannot begin to comprehend this brutal, insular world.
The hostages are accustomed to a European life with European comforts, said Marie Michel Moarbes, a Lebanese hostage, on the videotape. Now, ''it's getting very, very hard,'' she said. ''We don't have enough food. We don't have anything to drink. We don't have anything.''
She added, ''I will never go to another Asian place, starting from now.''
The local hatreds and rivalries have produced a bizarre counter-kidnapping in which a group of anti-rebel vigilantes seized nearly a dozen members of the family of the Abu Sayyaf leader, Khaddafi Janjalani, last month.
When Abu Sayyaf freed 18 of the hostages from the school, the vigilantes freed Mr. Janjalani's mother, pregnant wife and 1-year-old daughter. But they still hold nine other relatives.
All of this may be little more than a violent sideshow to the main Muslim insurgency in Mindanao, carried out by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. That group of about 15,000 fighters was formed 22 years ago as a splinter from what was then the mainstream Moro National Liberation Front.
In 1996 the latter group reached an accommodation with Manila. The group's leader, Nur Misuari, is now a government go-between with the Abu Sayyaf group.
Peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front broke down in mid-March, and, coinciding with the Abu Sayyaf kidnappings, that group has begun a new campaign of violence that has included a series of bombings and the brief kidnapping of 100 people on a pineapple plantation.
According to the government, that separate surge of violence has taken more than 300 lives and has forced more than 100,000 people to flee their homes to escape the fighting.
As the different local groups circle one another and the military mounts its separate counterinsurgency campaigns, the hostages are marched from one hideout to another, their feet bruised and bleeding, as they comfort one another and capture rainwater to drink, according to some of the rescued victims.
On Wednesday, just one step behind them, the military seized a bamboo hut where the foreign hostages had been held. They found some medicine that had been brought by a doctor, evidence of a hasty departure. And they found three room keys from the Malaysian diving resort.