Australian Strategic Policy Institute

Report Part Title: Philippines

Report Part Author(s): GREG FEALY

Report Title: COUNTERTERRORISM YEARBOOK 2018

Report Editor(s): Isaac Kfir, Sofia Patel, Micah Batt
Published by: Australian Strategic Policy Institute (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep16819.7

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Philippines
GREG FEALY
Associate Professor and Senior Fellow, Indonesian Politics, Department
of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs,
Australian National University

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COUNTERTERRORISM YEARBOOK 2018
The Philippines is now the site of the greatest terrorism
threat in Southeast Asia. That much is clear from the
dramatic developments in the southern island of
Mindanao during 2017. For some five months, a group
of pro-IS jihadists captured and held parts of the city
of Marawi in the province of Lanao del Sur, prompting
a massive counteroffensive by the Philippines military
that included extensive bombing of the city. Apart from
Filipino fighters, jihadists from elsewhere in region and
the Middle East also took part in the battle. Casualties
exceeded a thousand, and more than 300,000 people
were displaced.
This was the most significant jihadist operation in
Southeast Asia since the 2002 Bali bombings and it was
the first time that a Southeast Asian city had been taken
by Islamists. Like the Bali attack, Marawi has captured
the attention of jihadists globally and has inspired
emerging extremists. IS’s media outlets in the Middle
East have began featuring Marawi in their videos and
online publications, urging jihadists from across the
globe to join the cause in Mindanao. There are already
signs that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of prospective
fighters have left for the southern Philippines or are
seeking to go there.
The Marawi conflict has exposed the low competence
of Philippines security services in combating armed
jihadists in urban settings, as well as the failures of
President Rodrigo Duterte’s government in managing
the propaganda fallout. There’s a high likelihood that
Mindanao will entrench itself as the centre of pro-IS
extremism in Southeast Asia, assisting jihadists from
around the region to gain the skills needed to escalate
operations in their own countries.
THE RISE OF ISLAMIC
STATE IN THE
PHILIPPINES
Muslim insurgents in Mindanao have for decades
had ideological, financial and strategic links to other
Islamist militants across the world. Moro (the term
that Mindanao Muslims used to describe themselves)
jihadists received training in Libya from the 1970s
and in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan from the
mid-1980s till the early 1990s. Al-Qaeda provided
financial and technical support to the largest regional
insurgent group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF), in the early 2000s and also, more tenuously,
to the smaller Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG). However,
despite those international connections, Moro
jihadism remained overwhelmingly local in its focus.
The declared aim of the MILF and the ASG was the
creation of an autonomous Moro Islamic state in the
southern Philippines.
With the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria (ISIS) in late 2013, growing numbers of Moro
militants began to pledge their allegiance to the group,
particularly from early 2014, when ISIS won a string of
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military victories and declared itself a caliphate, to be
known simply as the Islamic State, in June 2014. One
of the ASG’s commanders, Isnilon Totoni Hapilon, was
among the first prominent jihadists to declare fealty,
bringing some, but not all, ASG fighters with him.
Although Hapilon was referred to as ‘the mujahid
authorized to lead the soldiers of the Islamic State in
the Philippines’, and al-amir (the emir) in a video by
IS’s Furqan Foundation, he wasn’t named as their wali
(provincial governor).1 Jihadists from Indonesia and
Malaysia also appeared in the video expressing their
loyalty to him. IS did not bestow the status of wilayat or
province on Mindanao, which it had done for 13 other
areas of the Islamic world where there were supportive
movements, and instead referred to the Philippines as
al-filibin, part of ard al-jihad (land of jihad), rather than
ard al-khilafa (land of the caliphate).2
Another armed Moro movement to pledge allegiance to
IS, in April 2015, was the Maute Group, led by brothers
Abdullah and Omar Maute. The Mautes had several
hundred fighters in their group and had clashed with
Philippines security services repeatedly since 2013.
The group escalated its attacks in November 2016,
capturing part of the middling city of Butig in Lanao
del Sur and raising the black standard of IS on the
town hall. Surprised by the brazen takeover, the
Armed Forces of the Philippines took six days to
clear the militants from the city.3 The Butig operation
became a blueprint for the subsequent attack on
Marawi conducted by the Maute group with Hapilon’s
ASG fighters.
The response of the Philippines Government to Butig
was one of complacency. After Butig was secured,
President Rodrigo Duterte dared the Maute group to
attack Marawi, the largest ‘Islamic city’ in Mindanao,
saying, ‘Go ahead [and burn down Marawi], be my
guest. We will wait for you there. No problem.’4 The
armed forces also continued to assert that IS had no
operational links within the country.
Indeed, debate raged among government analysts and
researchers as to how to characterise the Hapilon and
Maute allegiance to IS. For some analysts, it was merely
a pragmatic tactic of essentially insurgent and criminal
elements to gain an advantage in a long-running
conflict with the Philippines state. But other observers
believed that Hapilon and the Maute brothers had
developed a genuine ideological commitment to ISIS
that at least partly transcended their previous parochial
concerns.5 The weight of evidence increasingly favours
the latter view.
THE BATTLE FOR MARAWI
Fighting broke out between the jihadists and
government forces on 23 May 2017, after Philippines
military units searching for Omar and Abdullah
Maute in Marawi instead discovered Hapilon. Up to
500 Maute and Hapilon fighters from ASG launched
operations against army and police facilities, quickly
taking strategic sites, including government
offices, hospitals, schools, churches and
jails. The distinctive black flags of IS were
soon displayed in many parts of the city. The
government immediately began evacuating the
city’s more than 200,000 residents, leaving less
than 10% of the population there by the end of
May. Several thousand civilians were trapped
in jihadist-controlled areas, and several dozen
of them were held hostage. Reports emerged
of non-Muslims being killed if they refused to
convert to Islam, and IS videos showed the
desecration of churches in the city.
Government spokesmen boasted that the
jihadists would quickly be defeated, but it
soon became apparent that they grossly
underestimated the difficulty of the task. The
Hapilon–Maute forces were well entrenched in
a part of the city that featured fortified buildings
and tunnels—a product of the frequent clan
conflicts (rido) in that part of Mindanao. The
jihadists were well armed and trained and proved
adept at ambushing and sniping at Philippines
government soldiers and using grenades and
IEDs. They also had excellent local knowledge
and could move personnel and supplies via the
large lake that their Marawi stronghold abutted.
Alarmed at the rising casualty rate, the Philippines
defence forces began large-scale bombing of the
city, which rapidly caused extensive destruction
of buildings and infrastructure.6 By July 2017,
journalists who beheld the devastation began
referring to Marawi as ‘the Mosul of Southeast
Asia’.7
It wasn’t until mid-August that the defence forces
could claim to have gained the upper hand in the
battle. By that stage, the jihadists had been forced
back into a few neighbourhoods. Still, the task of
defeating them proved difficult, and Philippines
soldiers had to conduct the sort of intensive
street-by-street urban warfare that they had little
expertise in. On 16 October, the government
announced that Isnilon Hapilon and Omar Maute
had both been killed in firefights. Less than a
hundred fighters were estimated to remain in
Marawi at that point.8
Eventually, on 23 October, exactly five months
after the beginning of the battle, the Philippines
military was able to declare that Marawi had
been totally cleared of jihadists.9 The final death
toll, according to official figures, was 1,226,
comprising 974 jihadists (34 of them foreigners),
165 soldiers and police, and 87 civilians. Some
1,400 government security force members were
listed as wounded, to which can be added
several hundred jihadist and civilian casualties.10
Moreover, more than 5,000 buildings in the main
battle area of Marawi had been either destroyed
or heavily damaged as a result of the Philippines
defence forces’ bombing.
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In December 2017, Philippines officials were
Philippines
claiming that most of the pro-IS leadership in
the Philippines had been wiped out, including
not only the Maute brothers but also Hapilon’s
son and leading Malaysian IS figures, Dr Mahmud
Ahmad and Amin Baco. It’s unclear who currently
leads IS in the Philippines or Southeast Asia.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
MARAWI
Despite the eventual defeat of the jihadists, the
battle for Marawi was in many ways a strategic
and propaganda success for pro-IS forces in the
region. The ability of the Hapilon–Maute fighters
to seize and control a major city for almost half a
year, and to militarily withstand the Philippines
Army’s counterattack, won them valuable regional
and international credibility in jihadi circles. The
presence of as many as a hundred US advisers to
the army as well as US and Australian intelligence
support added to the propaganda dividend for
the jihadists, allowing them to cast the battle
as not just a local conflict but also as part of a
broader global Muslim–Christian contest.11
Moreover, the jihadists succeeded in drawing
the Philippines defence forces into a massive
overreaction that has alienated the local Muslim
population and added to the already deep levels
of resentment towards Manila’s handling of
Islamic issues. Most of the damage to buildings
and infrastructure in Marawi resulted from the
defence forces’ bombardment, not from jihadist
actions. This allowed the jihadists to portray the
Philippines Government, rather than themselves,
as the source of suffering and destruction. The
defence forces compounded the problem by
claiming to hold title to much of the land in
Marawi, creating anxiety among evacuees about
their ability to return to their former properties.
Many Marawi residents also fear that the Duterte
government will use the rebuilding process as
a way of Christianising the city. In effect, Manila
has played into the hands of jihadists and greatly
elevated the risk of pro-IS recruitment among
disaffected communities.
The Philippines Government may have overstated
its success following the quashing of the Marawi
insurgency. The idea that pro-IS groups have been
dealt a heavy blow from which they’ll struggle
to recover seems optimistic, as Moro jihadists
have demonstrated their regenerative capacity
over many decades. The ASG has gone through
multiple leadership changes after the death of
commanders and remains a dangerous and
resilient jihadist group, as Hapilon so recently
demonstrated. Many of those in the Maute group
could easily re-form under new leadership.
33
COUNTERTERRORISM YEARBOOK 2018
But, above all else, Marawi showed that the southern
Philippines, with its porous borders, tenuous
government control over large land areas, and corrupt
and inept security services, is the most favourable
site in the region for training jihadists and mounting
major operations. At a time when IS in Syria and Iraq is
shrinking rapidly after a succession of military defeats,
Mindanao stands as one of the more promising new
theatres of activity. This elevated profile was evident
when the Philippines received cover-story status in
NOTES
1 Charlie Winter, ‘Has the Islamic State abandoned its provincial
model in the Philippines?’, War on the Rocks, 22 July 2016,
online.
2 Winter, ‘Has the Islamic State abandoned its provincial model
in the Philippines?’
3 ‘Firefight erupts between gov’t troops, Maute group in Lanao
Sur’, The Inquirer, 26 November 2016; ‘AFP mulls deployment
of forces to Butig to prevent Maute attack’, Philippine Star,
3 December 2016.
4 ‘Duterte dared Maute group to attack Marawi in
December 2016 speech’, ABS–CBN News, 25 May 2017.
5 For the non-ideological interpretation, see Joseph Franco,
‘The battle for Marawi: appropriating ISIS propaganda and
importing the wilayah model’, Security Reform Initiative,
22 June 2017. For the pro-ideological view, see the comments
of Sidney Jones in the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s
Foreign Correspondent report, ‘Escape from Marawi’,
1 August 2017.
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IS’s Rumiyah magazine in June 2017, the first time that
Southeast Asia had so featured.12 Similarly, editions
3 and 4 of the Inside the Caliphate videos from IS’s
al-Hayat Media Centre were also devoted to Marawi and
Mindanao.13 This international attention is likely to lead
to greater numbers of jihadists from outside Southeast
Asia joining pro-IS groups in Mindanao, bringing the
attendant risk that, in time, they’ll take their skills to
other countries, thereby perpetuating and intensifying
the terrorist threat.
6 ‘Govt unleashes air and ground might to meet June 12
deadline to crush Maute Group’, Mindanews, 9 June 2017.
7 ‘Fighting ISIS from Mosul to Marawi’, Manila Bulletin,
7 July 2017.
8 ‘Malaysian teacher Mahmud Ahmad seen as new “emir”
of pro-ISIS militants in South-east Asia’, Straits Times,
16 October 2017; ‘Hapilon, Maute killed in Day 147 of Marawi
crisis’, Mindanews, 16 October 2017.
9 ‘Marawi combat operations over—Lorenzana’, Rappler,
23 October 2017.
10 ‘AFP: Maute stragglers’ death toll at 11’, CNN Philippines,
8 November 2017.
11 ‘US joins battle as Philippines takes losses in besieged city’,
CNBC, 10 June 2017.
12 ‘The jihad in East Asia’, Rumiyah, Issue 10, Ramadan 1438.
13 See Inside the caliphate, nos. 3 and 4, at Jihadology.net.
 Philippines

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COUNTERTERRORISM YEARBOOK 2018

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