How ISIS is rising in the Philippines as it dwindles in the Middle East

Across the islands of the southern Philippines, the black flag of the Islamic State is flying over what the group considers its East Asia province.

Men in the jungle, two oceans away from the arid birthplace of the Islamic State, are taking the terrorist brand name into new battles.

As worshippers gathered in January for Sunday Mass at a Catholic cathedral, two bombs ripped through the church compound, killing 23 people. The Islamic State claimed a pair of its suicide bombers had caused the carnage.

An illustration circulated days later on Islamic State chat groups, showing President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines kneeling on a pile of skulls and a militant standing over him with a dagger. The caption on the picture sounded a warning: “The fighting has just begun.”

The Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria has shriveled after four years of US-backed bombing and ground combat by Kurdish and Shiite militia fighters.

But far from defeated, the movement has sprouted elsewhere. And here in the Mindanao island group of the southern Philippines, the Islamic State has attracted a range of militant jihadis.

“ISIS has a lot of power,” said Motondan Indama, a former child fighter on the island of Basilan and cousin of Furuji Indama, a militant leader who has pledged fealty to the group. “I don’t know why my cousin joined, but it’s happening all over.”

The group first made a big push for southern Philippines recruitment in 2016, circulating videos online beckoning militants who could not travel to its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of fighters poured in from as far away as Chechnya, Somalia and Yemen, intelligence officials said.

The next year, militants who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State took over the city of Marawi in Mindanao. By the time the army prevailed five months later, the largest Muslim-majority city in the country lay in ruins. At least 900 insurgents were killed.

Duterte declared victory over the Islamic State. But his triumphalism has not deterred its loyalists from regrouping.

“ISIS has money coming into the Philippines, and they are recruiting fighters,” said Rommel Banlaoi, chairman of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research. “ISIS is the most complicated, evolving problem for the Philippines today, and we should not pretend that it doesn’t exist because we don’t want it to exist.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service