The lessons of terrorism in Mindanao

By Dan Steinbock             

The Ramawi terror did not come out of the blue. It is the result of decades of economic polarization, political exclusion, neglect of terrorism by the Aquino administration, and ISIL’s collapse in Syria and Iraq. If the stabilization fails now, terror will spread beyond Mindanao.

The foothold in the Philippines

On May 23, 2017, an ongoing armed conflict started in Marawi, the capital of Lanao del Sur in Mindanao. Philippine government forces were surprised by affiliated militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), including the Maute and Abu Sayyaf Salafi jihadists groups.

Initially, President Duterte declared a 2-month martial law in Mindanao hoping to suppress the terrorist insurgency immediately. In July, the government extended martial law in Mindanao to the year-end. By August, after Duterte informed the leaders of the Senate and House about “new terror plots in Mindanao,” he asked for 30,000 more troops to crack down on ISIL and other emerging threats.

Despite some criticism, without Duterte’s decisive action and martial law, Jihadists would have gained a foothold in Mindanao and terror would already be spreading in the Philippines and regionally.

To the old entrenched interests, the Marawi story is inconvenient domestically and internationally.

Domestic neglect

In March 2016, after years of gross neglect of emerging terrorist threats and the 2015 Mamasapano massacre, then-President Aquino stated that the Islamic State had no presence in the Philippines. At that time, ISIL’s recovered insignias and documents, a foothold, training and jihadist loyalists were in the country. Moreover, the number of ISIL sympathizers had been on the rise since 2014; perhaps since US military interventions in the Middle East in the early 2000s.

Domestically, it was this neglect that led to the rise of the ISIL-led coalition under Isnilon Hapilon, who had fought in the Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf group, and the Maute brothers, scions of a political family clan, who used to head a private militia that engaged in extortion and pledged alliance to ISIL a year before President Aquino still denied its presence in the country.

It was this fatal neglect that allowed ISIL to infiltrate Mindanao, but also to escalate the regionalization of Jihadist terror. Today, the “East Asia Wilayah” comprises jihadists from several Southeast Asian nations (Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar), and potentially others from the Middle East, North Africa and Chinese Uyghurs.

International geopolitics

International media has contributed to the neglect by ‘geo-politicizing’ the roots of terror in Mindanao. Last June, New York Times released a story by Richard C. Paddock which claimed that “Duterte, focused on drug users in the Philippines, ignored the rise of ISIS.” However, unlike Aquino administration, Duterte has warned for years about the emerging terrorist threat in the country.

A month earlier, Paddock had released another story, “Mysterious Blast in Philippines Fuels Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘Hatred’ of US,” in which he used amateur psychology to explain away the infamous Meiring case in Davao in the early 2000s. Reportedly, the latter case was a CIA effort to cooperate with Jihadists to foster destabilization through Mindanao in the Southeast Asia, which would then be used to legitimize greater US presence in the region.

Mindanao as Islamic State destination

When the Aquino administration opted for its pivot to the US, re-established old military ties with the Pentagon and invited American troops back to the Philippines, it virtually ensured that the Philippines would morph into a major target for jihadists.

In June 2012, months after the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, the Khilafah, a major jihadist website, argued that since “the US will keep six aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific and will shift 60% of its warships to the region, over the coming years until 2020,” the Jihadists were obligated to bring Islamic power in the region.

When the ISIL began terror in Iraq and Syria in 2014, it warned that the first ISIL-affiliated attacks in world capitals and Asia were only a matter of time, no longer a matter of principle. Historical and geographic forces fueled the coming upsurge.

In March 2016, Wikileaks released a massive load of US diplomatic cables dating back to 1979. According to Julian Assange, the evidence indicated that the decision by the CIA and Saudi Arabia to plough billions of dollars into arming the Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union paved the way to the creation of al-Qaeda and eventually to the ISIL. US counter-terrorist studies support the claim.

The spread of Jihadism

Historically, Jihadism originates from the Mujahedin – the guerrilla-type Islamist Afghan warriors in the Soviet–Afghan War – which Washington exploited in the 1980s. Yet, preferences for destinations have changed over time. Until 2001, Afghanistan was the key destination where volunteers joined al Qaeda or the Taliban (or the Mujahedin in the 1980s). After the US had overthrown of the Taliban government, Pakistan became the preferred destination. Events in Somalia made it the preferred destination in 2007-08, while the civil war in Syria began to attract foreign fighters, with the number increasing in 2013-14.

In each case, US interventions paved the way to massive destabilization, which in turn supported the spread of terror. Nevertheless, the footholds of devastation, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, that preceded the ISIL were largely regional and had few spillovers internationally.

Iraq and Syria changed the old status quo. Now, Middle East battlefields have become sites of international interventions, which has worldwide consequences and frequent spillovers. The fighters would return home, often with battle-weary resentment but knowledge about firearms, explosives and insurgency.

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Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served as research director at the India, China and America Institute (USA) and visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). 

The article was originally published by The Manila Times on August 7, 2017.

Featured Image Source: Pixabay

Part 2 of the article can be accessed here