Marawi City was virtually unknown outside the Philippines until 23 May 2016, when hundreds of jihad warriors stormed the sprawling urban metropolis of 200,000 residents and claimed large parts of it for the Islamic State. Since then the Philippines Armed Forces have struggled to regain control and the fight is ongoing .
The background to this crisis is multifaceted. There has been a long history of regional separatism and sectarian strife in the southern regions of the Philippines where the country’s 6 million-strong Muslim minority is centred.
When the Spanish first colonised the Philippines from the 16th century onwards, their most difficult enemies were the Muslim communities of the south. Had the Spanish not arrived in the region, the Philippines would probably have become a Muslim-majority nation like neighbouring Indonesia.
The Spanish colonial authorities never succeeded in subduing the Muslim south. Neither did their colonial successors, the Americans, who ruled the Philippines from 1898–1946.
Regional rebellions
Since the Philippines gained independence following liberation from the Japanese, the national government, centred on Manila in the north, has faced a series of regional rebellions from the Muslim south. The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was founded in 1972 and, under the leadership of Nur Misuari, it conducted a series of military campaigns against the Philippines Government until a peace agreement was brokered in 1996.
A breakaway group from the MNLF, which styled itself as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), fought for southern Muslim (or Moro) independence in a number of insurgency campaigns between the late 1970s and 2011.
But it is the radical Islamist movements which rejected the willingness of the MNLF and MILF to negotiate with the government that are calling the shots in today’s southern Philippines.
In 1991, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) emerged under the leadership of Abdurajik Janjalani and, while it embraced an increasingly Islamist rhetoric, its primary early activities were banditry, piracy, kidnapping and murder. Some of the most notorious incidents involving the ASG were the kidnapping of tourists and foreign workers and either ransoming them or beheading them, as happened with the American hostage Guillermo Sobero in 2001.
In recent years, the ASG under the leadership of Isnilon Hapilon has aligned itself increasingly with international Islamist terrorist groups, especially Al-Qaeda and, lately, Islamic State. From 2014, the ASG affiliated itself with Islamic State and swore allegiance to the Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Radical terrorist factions tend to emerge in multiples. Another group of similar ideological leanings is the Maute group, which took its name from two brothers from Marawi City who are committed to establishing an Islamic state in the southern Philippines.
Video found
The Philippines’ authorities recently released a video found on a mobile phone belonging to a jihadi captured in an army raid. It shows part of a meeting that involved Ipsilon Hapilon and two of the Maute brothers, plus others, planning the raid on Marawi City. The attack was scheduled for the beginning of Ramadan on 26 May, but was brought forward three days because of government raids.
The Philippines’ authorities were taken by surprise by the size and strength of the armed insurgents who attacked Marawi City, which is regarded in local popular culture as the Islamic heartland of the southern Philippines. Since the initial attack, the insurgents have taken many hostages, especially Christians, and destroyed a number of buildings.
Deaths have run into the hundreds, with army sources claiming that 120 insurgents have been killed. These include local Filipino jihadis but also a number of foreign fighters: Indonesians, Malaysians, Chechens, Saudis, Yemenis and other nationalities.
This last fact points to a matter of great concern to governing authorities in both the Philippines and its Southeast Asian neighbours. As the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria collapses, with its demise imminent in coming months, clearly international jihadi groups are looking for alternative locations to set up mini Islamist states with all the usual hallmarks: terror, murder, beheading, persecution of minorities and so forth.
The wild and almost ungovernable regions of the southern Philippines represent fertile ground for the international jihad movements. The fight taking place in Marawi City at present may only represent the beginning of regional troubles, as jihad warriors from the Middle East seek to establish an alternative caliphate in Southeast Asia.
