MANILA: A November visit by men who allegedly killed 15 people on Australia’s most famous beach has shone a fresh light on the troubled Mindanao region of the southern Philippines.
Australian police are investigating the possibility that father-and-son duo Sajid and Naveed Akram travelled to the Philippines to train with extremists, a possibility for which the Philippine government insists there is no evidence.
Islamist militants once hoped to turn Mindanao into the seat of a Southeast Asian caliphate.
AFP looks at the region’s violent history, the shifting landscape of the past decade, and the current state of the government’s battle with Islamist extremists.
A history of rebellion
Mindanao, the southern third of the archipelago nation and traditional homeland of its five million-strong Muslim minority, has a history of armed conflict that dates back to the Spanish and US colonial periods from the 16th century to the start of the 21st.
Post-Philippine independence, a separatist rebellion broke out in the early 1970s. Porous borders, weak policing and an abundance of guns in local hands gave Islamist guerrilla groups fertile ground to pursue their goals.
Shifting allegiances
Younger combatants began breaking off from the separatist rebels in the early 1990s, forming groups such as Abu Sayyaf that waged deadly bombing campaigns against Christian targets and kidnapped Western tourists to finance their activities.
American military advisers began deploying in the region in 2002 to help the Philippines combat militants following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
By 2014, groups including Abu Sayyaf and Maute began pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group.
A tenuous peace
The older generation of Muslim rebels ended their fight in 2014 when they signed a peace agreement in exchange for limited self-rule in a small number of Muslim provinces, but the IS-linked groups did not recognise the accord and continued their armed campaigns.
While the newly formed Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao will soon have its own elected parliament, the decommissioning of thousands of weapons has been slow, and armed rebels have occasionally taken part in family blood feuds that have sometimes led to the killings of soldiers and police.
The bloody battle of Marawi
In May 2017, hundreds of Filipino Muslim fighters as well as foreign militants joined forces to take over the Mindanao city of Marawi, intending to make it the capital of a Southeast Asian caliphate to be ruled by their radical interpretation of Islam.
A bloody siege by government forces ended five months later with the loss of more than a thousand lives and with many of the militant groups’ most senior leaders being killed off.
‘Fragmented’, not gone
The Philippine military has said Mindanao’s remaining jihadists now number little more than 50, from a high of 1,257 in 2016. “They are fragmented, and they have no leadership,” spokeswoman Colonel Francel Padilla told reporters Wednesday, claiming tourism was now flourishing in areas once notorious for kidnappings.
But military operations are ongoing, with the army only last week claiming to have killed the alleged leader of a militant group.
While acknowledging that government offensives have made it difficult for jihadists to operate, Manila-based security analyst Rommel Banlaoi told AFP they have maintained their connections “locally and globally” and still run training camps in central Mindanao.
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