 Thank you Sylvia, that is a fascinating research indeed. We're going to start with our second session, and the second session will look at trends in south and southeast Asia, basically looking at ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Our first speaker is Dr Stephen Rodd. He's based at Department of Political and Social Change. He's an expert on local government decentralisation and public opinion pollings. So please join me in welcoming Dr Rodd. Thank you very much. Thank you to the organisers for all of you to be here. As you can see I've got a bandage on my head. A week ago I had a bike accident and I knew I was concussed when I couldn't remember who was the president of the Philippines or the president of the United States. When I related this to my daughter back in Manila she said, oh a moment of bliss. So as you can tell from the brief introduction I'm a development professional. For 17 years I ran the Asia Foundation's country office in the Philippines and before that for 18 years I was an academic at the University of the Philippines. I got into this business because these people came into my space. I was working with the mainstream Islamic forces in the Philippines, the Moral National Liberation Front and the Moral Islamic Liberation Front for a number of years, including being in negotiations etc. And then beginning in 2014 these people started popping up. Let me talk a little bit about that. But just as one of the things I'd like to steal an idea of Greg and that is noticing that there's been already something said today that are useful for people like me. When Dr Ismail was talking about the sectarian tensions I was reminded of the fact that for a long time I thought Philippine Muslims were pretty relaxed about Shia because they're of course majority Sunni. But it turns out that's not the case. ISIS published a list of 11 of the Shia centers in the Philippines and two have already been taken out. One was bombed in Manila and the other one was burned down in Morale City. One of the 11 I said to the head I didn't know you were Shia and he said I'm not. They just did that to discredit us with the community which gives you an idea of the power of that kind of propaganda. The second point that came up and this is what I'd heard from him before Heroro talked about the different stages of the insurgency. And so when as the defended territory in Morale gets smaller and smaller I was already alerted to the fact that the Islamic State in the Philippines was likely to revert back to more conventional guerrilla warfare which you can see in the upsurge of violence coming out of the Bunks of Moral Islamic Freedom fighters somewhat about 150 or 200 kilometers away from Morale. So there's a fair amount of this kind of stuff going back and forth. But for the purposes of this conference information warfare, right? And so in the Philippines I'm going to skip right over the partisan information warfare that's ongoing. The fake news, the fake news that the vice president is pregnant and had an abortion or something like that that is going around. And never mind, there's lots of fake news in the Philippines. So basically as I said I was working on the peace process with the Moral Islamic Liberation Front and the Moral National Liberation Front. And then in 2014 when the Caliphate was declared suddenly they became much more active in our areas in central Luzon. A lot of people started pledging baya including a pilon of the Abu Sayyaf and eventually the Maute brothers, the two groups who've come together to take over Morale. But also we became aware of the fact that there was recruiting on going in campuses throughout southern Philippines. That whether you're talking about madrasas or state universities there were people going around organizing students. And the reason we became aware is the Asia Foundation gives grants to organizations run by Muslims which have campus chapters. And there was competition for the good students. Suddenly if you were articulate or if you were forward working instead of being asked to join the book club you were being asked if you wanted to study more about Islam. And if you've told you wanted to study more about Islam you would be a series of different kind of recruiting techniques and eventually you might end up in a training camp learning how in a rural area to use weapons. And that happened when there was a raid and about eight or ten young college students who their parents thought had gone off for an Islamic seminar or killed by the Philippine Marines in a raid. So that sort of thing was going on. Now as this was happening the Philippine government was in denial. So a report said they were doing their field work in late 2014. There were more challenges obtaining information on the subject of Daesh radicalization in the Philippines when compared to both Indonesia and Malaysia while the policy makers and law enforcement officials the author met were professional, cooperative and helpful. The official position was that Daesh had to make its presence felt in the Philippines in a significant manner. They were also the opinion that Daesh would find it difficult to recruit its citizens. So I don't know why there's several hundred of them in Marawi City. So they began to, I'm sorry, let's put a step back a second. The information warfare being indigenously produced in the Philippines didn't change immediately, right? There were still lots of cell phone videos. Basically the Abu Sayyaf in the province of Sulu would produce what amounts to proof of life videos where the victim is there and pleading for their life or whatever. And sometimes there was an ISIS flag in the background. But it's kind of a fair judgment of the Philippine security forces that basically what those guys were doing was trying to raise the ransom, was trying to increase the price just by bringing in the brand name of ISIS. But that's not all that was going on. There's another branch of the Abu Sayyaf, those in Basilan, those who were headed by the guy Habilon who was eventually named Amir. And they have consistently been considerably more Islamic in their approach. And back in 2007 and 2008 they sent a letter including to the Catholic Bishop in the island of Basilan since about 20% of the people in Basilan are Christian. Basically saying that non-Muslims have a choice, right? They can leave, they can fight, they can convert, or they can pay the tax, right? I call it the demi-tax, I think it's called jirza, right? The tax that non-Muslims living in an Islamic state. And so Habilon has consistently stayed much more true to the original vision of the Abu Sayyaf which was founded by people who are interested in caliphates but which had mostly deteriorated due to military pressure killing off all their leaders. And now in Salu at least they're mostly for kidnapped for ransom which is very lucrative by the way. This last round they kidnapped two Canadians in Norwegian and a Filipina, the Canadians don't pay and so they were beheaded, the Norwegian pays and the Filipino pays. And so I think they got something on the order of $900,000 which spreads a lot around. But those are normal kinds of kidnapped videos. The ISIS type videos started finally coming in early 2016, April 2016 I believe it was. This group Maute headed by a pair of brothers who were educated in the Middle East and who started calling themselves in 2015 Islamic State in Ranau. Ranau, Lanau, Barawi, they're all the same word in the language. They are styling themselves more like ISIS and so when they picked up six Christian sawmill workers they executed two of them as spies. And they did it. They did it right. They had orange jumpsuits and the hands behind them and beheaded on the video and holding up the head and so on and so forth. And that was the first one that really had the kinds of troes that you see in ISIS videos. And there have not been many more of that but it's been clearer and clearer of course that there is the kind of communication. So if you look on your program the upper right is from Marawi. That's from a video called Inside the Caliphate, number three. And Marawi is there is either the land of Higirau or Jihad. This goes with the ISIS urging that's been ongoing since the middle of 2016. If you can't get to the Middle East you can go to Mindanao, you can go to the Philippines. That's a place to go. In that video if you watch it there are no beheadings, there are dead bodies but there's no snuff going on in it. It's clear that those guys in Marawi were using drones with video cameras to provide feeds to ISIS central. You can see the kind of shots they're doing. So this back and forth has been ongoing and recently, last week they released as a single. I don't know how you call these things. Anyhow the Nashid in English that was the background for this video it's holding firm to the rope of Allah or the brothers of Marawi engraved in their heart as the love for the Lord and in him they will continue to bleed. That kind of thing going on in the Nashid. So it's clear that ISIS central is paying attention but it's not a willyot yet because they never really controlled territory so they're going to retreat back into the rural areas. So that's the trend of propaganda media war jihad in the Philippines. Now how about the other side? Well let me put it this way. The easy way to say it is the Philippine government is losing the propaganda war on this one in particular. I mean aside from just the sheer fact that the full force of the armed forces of the Philippines in the months to retake parts of a city back and forth has been terrible. So for instance three days after he declared martial law President Rodrigo Duterte revealed on Friday that the bounty group fighting government troops in Marawi city was founded by two brothers Abdullah and Omar. That part of the sentence is right. Who were former police officers involved in illegal drugs. They were policemen in Manila who got enamored of the money of Shabu, methamphetamines. They came home here and established one of the biggest factories of Shabu in the province Llanel del Sur. I mean there's nothing true about that. I mean it's not even vaguely close to true and it's public knowledge that it's not vaguely close to true. The IPAC of Sydney Jones published a report on these guys in October of 2016. So it's really a problem. But then he goes on to say, Duterte goes on to say he's making a speech to the military under martial law. If you go down, I go down. But this martial law and the consequences of martial law and the ramifications of martial law I and I alone would be responsible. Do your job, I will take care of the rest. I'll imprison you myself, he said, and I will go too. But if you had raped three, I admit it, it's on me. This is Duterte talking. He became most famous in Australia talking about raping in an Australian missionary. He's talking about raping Muslims in an area where under martial law back in the 1970s there was systematic rape. The much nicer military. There was a report, a true report that all of Marawi is part of a military reservation. Believe me, I've lived in the Philippines 35 years. Property titles are very vague in the Philippines. So it's true, all these people own land. They have titles that are on a military reservation. Now everything is destroyed. What's going to happen? The military assured everybody that they wouldn't take any more land than what they need. Not, you can go back to your house. If you've got a house, you get to keep it. No, they were trying to reassure people that they weren't going to be greedy, but the way it came out was terrible. First conclusion is that the Philippine government is losing the media war and sometimes seems to not even realize that it's in a media war, in a propaganda war. The Baltics do realize, they actually pushed out a video that said to the people of Marawi, why are you mad at us for destroying Marawi? We just came here to free you from the kafar. It's the kafar who are destroying Marawi. They were saying this in Filipino so that they're reaching out to all the different ethnic groups because that's the common language people have. So they get that they're in a propaganda war. First point is, the propaganda war is beyond the ken of the Philippine government. The second one, and this is a much more general question, I'm wondering if ISIS has changed its tactics in what it does in the media war because after the resort's world attack in Manila where a crazy guy went in and started a fire and stole chips and then committed suicide, all on continuous video, that's all he did inside, ISIS claimed it. There's no evidence whatsoever of this that he had any connection. Journals went back over the last 10 days of his life. There's no evidence whatsoever of any connection. And yet, some people, including Sidney Jones, basically said there must be something because ISIS never claims anything that there's no connection. Now we've got Las Vegas. There's no evidence whatsoever. This guy had his girlfriend living with him until the last week of his life and he sent her away. He was obviously planning to do it. There's no evidence whatsoever of a connection with ISIS and ISIS claimed it. So I raised that as a question, not for poor Philippine experts such as myself, but for broader experts who look on ISIS. Thank you very much. A great presentation for making my work not difficult at all, especially, you know, it's very hard to be a militant timekeeper. Well, our next speaker is Mr Niyamadula Ibrahimi. He is an Endeavour award holder and a PhD scholar. He co-founded Afghanistan Watch, a research organisation focusing on human rights and conflict settlement in Afghanistan, and he also worked for the International Crisis Group. I would like to welcome him and please join me in welcoming Mr Brahees. Thank you, Rehana. Thank you everyone for giving me the opportunity to speak at this wonderful conference on this very, very lively and interesting topic. Over the next 10, 15 minutes, we'll focus on insurgen propaganda and information uncertainty in Afghanistan, and I'm primarily focusing on the Taliban. I thought maybe I can start by telling the story of a short conversation once I had with the former Taliban official in Kabul who used to work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil after they took control of Kabul in 1996. One of the stories he told me is quite relevant to the themes of the conference. That is, after 1997 when the Taliban took control of large swathes of northern Afghanistan, he said that a group of us younger, more professional diplomats organised a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, raising the issue with the Minister at that time who was Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, that sends a Taliban approaching the borders of Central Asia, we should issue a statement to assure Central Asian Republics that we are not posing any security threats to the territorial integrity and security of the Central Asian Republics. In response, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil raised another question. Do we really mean it? Once we take control of Afghanistan and we consolidate our rule here, we might just go across the border. And why should we tell Allah? So the main point I'm trying to communicate here is this whole idea of Taliban propaganda, of their sincerity and honesty and how they try to communicate to different audiences. And the central theme is the idea of uncertainty. Uncertainty is an important part of everyday life everywhere, but in countries which are torn by war and conflict, like Afghanistan for nearly four decades now, uncertainty is a very, very important part of life on a day-to-day basis. And this affects how people make their decisions for themselves, for their kids, and for the future of their children. And obviously there are a lot of hard decisions to be made. And I will explore that a little bit later with some data which I used from the Asia Foundation's area of the Afghan people. What I'm presenting is, as I grew up in Afghanistan, but also as a researcher working for the International Crisis Group, looking at different aspects of the Taliban insurgency after a few periods of Taliban collapse between 2001 and 2005. So what we are witnessing in comparison to 1998 is that there is this boom of Taliban propaganda. There is propaganda campaign, in which a lot of people think it's telling something new about the movement, about their ideology, and about their aims. Some people think the Taliban who were in the 1990s against taking a photograph are now so effectively using social media means that there is a new type of Taliban emerging, the new Taliban who are smarter but also more modern, and for some people that also means more consilable because they have been exposed to modern aspects of life. And some people even claim that there is a Taliban kind of virtual caliphate emerging. This is about a group which in the 1990s, Evan would not let someone take a picture of them. But in their information campaign, the Taliban have been also facing the challenge of how to communicate to different audiences. And I think three different audiences is key to understanding how the Taliban develop, formulate, and communicate their messages. The first and primary is the people in Afghanistan. And this is the area where they operate, and this is an area where they rely on the support networks. They can mobilize and can organize in the cities, villages, and towns of the country. And the second primary audience, I believe, is the international jihadist network, which is loosely connected to the international Salafi jihadist that you mentioned, which comes with certain etiological tendencies, with certain political views. And they have got the money and the resources in which the Taliban have not been keen to ignore. And the third audience is more international. People who are engaged in a strategic environment in Afghanistan, obviously including the U.S. and NATO, and other countries in the region. So these three different narratives that the Taliban have been communicating to these three different groups have also been conflicting, contradictory, but not necessarily mutually exclusive. Maybe I begin by making a couple of remarks about how they communicate to the international audience. One of the key things is that they have been emphasizing that they are a nationalist movement. Their ambitions are restricted to Afghanistan, which, as I said earlier, there is this deep international contradictions within the movement, whether it is genuinely a nationalist movement or not. And a lot of people have been trying to buy into that narrative, in particular people have been interested in the idea of a potential settlement and peaceful reconciliation with the Taliban, because if they are a nationalist movement limited to Afghanistan, they are not posing any security threat to the West or other countries in the region. However, the narrative of communication are also shaped by the fact that they are embedded in a transnational network of jihadi soloists. It is through here that they mobilize recruits. It is through here that they mobilize resources, money and arms. And these are powerful networks. The most powerful example of this is obviously the Al Qaeda. But more recently, I have been witnessing that after the arrival of the ISIS or Daesh in Afghanistan in 2014, there have been this competition between the two groups. The Taliban initially trying to approach them and talk to them. But on the long-term basis, after there was this conflict of interests and control of territories and resources, they have been going back to this whole idea that we are a national movement and the Taliban, the ISIS are terrorists and they are internationalists. For the Afghan audience, the Taliban have been very, very selectively using imagery symbols of Afghanistan's national history. That includes the history of the Afghan, Anglo-Afghan wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this respect, I had the opportunity to work with a research project in 2015, which looked at the role of Taliban communication and social media and how they recruit their members. In this respect, the Taliban were very, very keen that they were part of this kind of historical continuity, which began at least in the 19th century. There were farce in the colonialists. They emerged in Afghanistan and they had this in malign intentions for the country. They were drawing on the imagery of the 19th century and early 20th century of Afghanistan. However, there are also conflicting reports here. When they pose themselves as a national force, Afghanistan is also in a highly diverse country, both ethnically but also religiously. The Hazaras predominantly shears have been the primary victims of the Taliban atrocities since the 1990s. They have been keen to emphasise that aspect of it, that we are a national force with all brothers. We have nothing in conflict between us. At the same time, because of that international connection, because of that ideological influence that has come through the Taliban's embedded nature in the international network of jihadists, sectarian violence appear quite frequently and can be directly attributed to the Taliban. Maybe in the last five minutes, I would like to show a few slides. In these slides, the key thing I would like to show is the idea of uncertainty. As I said, uncertainty is common, but in Afghanistan this graph shows the fluctuation in the economic growth in Afghanistan, which began from 8.4 in 2003, reaching 21% in 2009 before collapsing to 1.3 in 2004 and 0.8 in 2015. The main message I would like to deliver here is when they communicate to a national audience, like those in Afghanistan, people have these very, very uncertain prospects. This is just one indication of how political security and economic conditions can be changing so rapidly. Everyone of those changes, people lose jobs, they lose access to social and economic opportunities, and also, obviously, security as well. But given all these talks that the Taliban are effective in their media campaign, what is emerging here, I'm drawing on the Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan people, which they have been conducting since 2006. The main thing which is emerging here is that the common people in that country, they are neither won over by the Afghan government, nor by the Taliban in their information campaign. One of the questions they ask is, generally speaking, do you think the country is going in the right direction? The positive answer for that right direction changed from 44% in 2006 to just 29% in 2016, and 66% of the people in 2016 thought the country was going in the wrong direction. One of the other questions they ask in that way is gauging the level of sympathy for the armed opposition groups. They ask, would you say that you have a lot of sympathy, little sympathy, or no sympathy at all for the armed opposition groups? You can see people who had lots of sympathy declined from 22% in 2009 to just 5% in 2016, and people who had no sympathy at all increased from 34% in 2009 to 77% in 2016. So what this is showing is that common people are not persuaded by the Taliban propaganda campaign, and this is very, very interesting because during this period when the people's sympathy declined for the Taliban, their reach has expanded according to US officials, including the special inspector general for Afghanistan, the construction. The Taliban, as of last year, controlled or influenced over 40% of the territory of the country. Okay, sure. That means that as a Taliban a smaller, more distanced force, inaccessible, people could hear their messages, people had higher sympathy, but as the Taliban got closer to them again, controlling their villages, imposing their harsh way of life in villages, cities, from province to provinces, that level of support has been declining. Unfortunately, as we can see, that same level of support has not been going up for the Afghan government as well. This means that there is an information war going on here, but that information war, looking at the level of support of the ordinary people in Afghanistan is not being won by either side. So there is a whole level of uncertainty which has been going on for years and years and years, and one of the interesting observations which I came up in my PhD, but also in other research, is that people are just trying to weigh up their options. One of those ways is that you, instead of committing ideologically, making a normative commitment to a group, people are ensuring their survival through creation and maintenance of multiple linkages with different groups, because when the Taliban are in control of a province, you don't want to be a person who has been seen as anti-Taliban sometimes in the past. With that note, I'll stop here and look forward to the rest of the conference. Mr Brahimi, our final speaker for this session is Associate Professor Great Pili. He is the head of the Department of Political and Social Change. He works on Indonesia, especially looking at the Muslim traditionalist party, and more recently, he has examined terrorism, transnational Islamist movements, and religious commodification in Australia, which is fascinating. And also looking at the broader trends in contemporary Islamic politics in Southeast Asia. Please join me in welcoming Chris. Thank you very much, Raihan. So what I'm going to do is, in a way, give a slightly broader picture than what Steve gave, concentrating closely on the Philippines, but many of the themes are actually going to be common, I think, to both of our papers. Indeed, several speakers have mentioned some of the inside the caliphate videos that are released by the Ohio Media Centre from one of the official ISIS media offices. I would like to be able to show some of these to you, and Steve referred to this particular one, is a video that uses the drone footage, very high production values, as we've come to expect for an ISIS video. But unfortunately, the university's Information Commons technology blocks us from showing this. You can show it in your home. You can download it from the Jihadology website, which does a great service to researchers by making this material available, but you cannot play this on any of the computers in public-jecture theatres like this. So I have to make do with just a photo. So inside the caliphate, number three, which came out several months ago, and then a few weeks ago, we had inside the caliphate number four, and I'll talk a little bit about the contrast between them a little later on. Also, the cover of the Remaia, the latest edition of the Remaia Rome magazine, which for the first time ever has Southeast Asia, when this is calling it East Asia, but really Southeast Asia, on the cover. Much sought-after status by pro-ISIS groups in the region, and they have finally achieved that this edition came out perhaps five weeks ago, six weeks ago. It contains, it's all in very good English, and as we've come to expect, very high-quality imagery and the like used. So this is a story of a Malaysian jihadist who's gone and joined the fighters in the Philippines. We also have a kind of a centrefold, as it were, of the leader, the Amir of ISIS forces in Southeast Asia, Isnilon Hapilon, that Steve referred to just before, quite a long interview with him. So there he is, the man in the middle, with a kafeia around his head, and this is on the, there's things about a six-page interview, so it's quite extensive material. So in ISIS's world, this is star status. This is enjoying time in the spotlight. And what this brings to my mind, having been involved in the study of Southeast Asian terrorism for some time, is recollections of when Southeast Asia was regarded as the second front in the global war on terrorism. So if we go back to 2002, for example, Colin Powell, was one of various Bush administration officials who used this term of the second front, and it really marked the first time in a great meaning, really since the Cold War, that America had much interest in Southeast Asia at all. And so we've got a whole string of articles about Southeast Asia, the second front. We've got a lot of US institutions employing Southeast Asianists to study this. And we even have... Excuse me, is that going to go down? And we even got books on this kind of second front. So it's not just the Western world is now, again, paying attention to Southeast Asia in a jihadism context, but also that ISIS itself is. So just to give us slightly a quick wrap-up of how ISIS's impact on Southeast Asian jihadism, it has been immense, but not as great as some terrorist analysts would assert. And indeed, before the Marawi battle broke out on 23 May this year, you would have to argue that ISIS has had much greater potential to change the dynamics of terrorism rather than actually having realised that. Because although there are great many plots across Southeast Asia that were being hatched in the name of ISIS, none of them had been successful as terrorism attacks. So therefore you could see people with the will to engage in this kind of violence, but not having the technical capacity to do so. One of the first things that ISIS did to creation of ISIS and particularly is more and more prominent Southeast Asian jihadists pledged allegiance to it was it divided the jihadist community. And in so far as we can get a sense of what this community is and by that we really mean people who consume the website material by the books, attend the lectures, given by preachers who have got well-known pro-ISIS orientations. The majority of jihadist or anti-ISIS orientations would be another way to put it. The majority of those people opposed ISIS. Even though recruitment towards ISIS's cause grew rapidly from early 2014, nonetheless the majority remain opposed. The largest number of pro-ISIS groups can really be found in Indonesia. We're probably looking at several thousand. I mean this is no clearly defined group of people. It's got very blurry boundaries to it. But if we look at data on how many people are donating money, how many people are helping to organise a passage for example of fighters from a place like Indonesia to Syria and Iraq or to the Philippines, there's quite broad networks that have some kind of participation in this. The Philippines, Stephen's already spoken about, the Philippines is the only place in Southeast Asia where we see any significant military capacity and that's one of the reasons why this honour, as it were, was bestowed upon the head of a Filipino jihadist leader, is Neon Hapilon, one of the commanders of Abu Sayaf group, rather than an Indonesian. An Indonesia has traditionally seen itself as the focus of jihadism in the region. We have a smaller number of Malaysians involved as well, a couple of them, particularly Dr Mahmood Ahmad, playing an increasingly critical role in liaising between central ISIS and its operatives in the region. The main issue for us, and so I suppose my view would be that the terrorism threat across most of Southeast Asia remain significantly lower now than what it was in the early 2000s when Gemma Islamia was at its height because most ISIS groups simply do not have the capability to put together large bombs or to mount more complex covert operations which would lead to mass casualties. People want to do it, but they simply cannot get the necessary skills off the internet and too many of the people with skills in bomb making who are able to pass that on to emerging jihadists have either been killed or are incarcerated or have left jihadism as well. And so the thing that could make a dramatic change here would be the return of experienced fighters especially from Syria and Iraq and the number of those coming back is actually still very small. Many of them appear much more willing to die on the battlefield in the Middle East than they are to return here and there are eschatological reasons for that which I'm happy to go into later if people are interested. But now increasingly the Philippines is looking as almost performing the kind of role that Afghanistan did from about 1985 to the early 1990s in that this is where people were, to some extent, bludded in battle even though the majority of South East Asian Mujahideen didn't see fighting. They nonetheless got the skills, they got the discipline, they got the international connections and the ideological training that equipped them for a much higher level of violent jihadism when they returned home. So a good example of one of these failed ISIS attacks was this is from the so-called Serena attack in central Jakarta in January of 2016 where there were four pro-ISIS perpetrators with homemade grenades, bombs, guns and they only, well I should say, their intention was to copy the Paris attack so they wanted to kill dozens of people they especially wanted to kill police and westerners. They did kill one person who was of western descent if I can put it that way who happened to be in fact a Muslim. All of the people killed in the attack were Muslims, no police were killed, the total was seven including the four perpetrators all of whom died. So in ISIS terms and indeed in local jihadist terms this was a bungled operation. The fact that it was clearly modelling itself on a major terrorism attack abroad and had not achieved any of its objectives just showed that for many local jihadists it showed how embarrassingly poor their ability was to bring off a major attack and you can see around them there were hundreds of thousands of people in this place and very low casualty rate came out of that. So if we're looking specifically at the information wars most jihadist recruitment in south east Asia is still done face to face. There's a growing role for online propaganda campaigns and the like but from the biographical information we have from people involved in pro-ISIS networks still it is that personal connections. It's a charismatic preacher, it's a family member, it's a friend, colleagues at school or at work. These are the ways in which people are getting pulled into jihadist organisations. One of the things we're seeing when we look at the types of people being recruited is enormous diversity. Some of them come from jihadist families but now they're third or fourth generation pedigree. People have been involved in other organisations such as Jameis Llamir or Dar al-Islam and now pledged members of ISIS. We also have high school kids who come from families that are unobservant Muslims and who have been recruited largely through online activities. So it really spans an enormous spectrum of people far wider than any previous phase of jihadist recruitment in South East Asia. ISIS, not surprisingly, is really the leader of this kind of online propaganda wars in South East Asia. It's interesting to look at the way in which this messaging had changed. Up until late 2015 most of what ISIS was trying to do was persuade South East Asians to go to Syria and Iraq. That was the main site they believed of jihadist struggle in the world. This was going to be where the end of time would take place. This final cataclysmic battle between Islam and its enemies and those people who were fighting on the right side would be vouchsafed salvation. So this is why probably some there in the order of a thousand South East Asians went and joined the fighting in Syria and Iraq. A great many hundred of them have died. Some of them as cannon fodder in that. Since late 2015 we've seen some of the prominent Southeast Asians in ISIS central using their networks back in their home countries to argue for operations in those home countries. So attack on your own soil rather than going to Syria. And then in the last few months we've seen a further swing in ISIS rhetoric which is telling people don't come to Syria, go to Philippines in particular or wage your jihad in your own country. And so two minutes again. So that's been quite a marked shift. The content ranges from the very visceral sorts of images that we have in that inside the Caliphate 3 video that I've showed the photo of beforehand. This shows people in the thicker battle firing machine guns covered in dust and grime sometimes with their feet on the bodies of dead Filipino soldiers. It shows them desecrating Christian churches. It's very graphic footage. It's very well shot including the use of drones and the like. But we also have images that we see inside the Caliphate at all as well which has no blood in it. There has no dead bodies. It has a relatively clean cut. Quite articulate Singaporean fighter who it calls, they call Abu Qayyul but in actual fact is this man Shafdun did Abdul Samad who left Singapore in 2014 to go to the Middle East. He told family he was going there to work but he's clearly become a recruit. There's a number of things in the video that are interesting but it's a different kind of appeal to the appeal that you would find inside the Caliphate 3. That presumably is appealing to people who have much greater sense of machismo, sense of adventure or daring do and people who want to see the sheer violence of the battle that is clearly depicted inside the Caliphate 3 which has south east Asians from various countries shown in that. Also of interest to me is the range of intellectual content. So some of the material is very superficial. It's relying on particular images and there's not much ideological or historical content at all. It's very simple branding. But there is also a high end, a more erudite kind of discourse that ISIS engages in and in Indonesia the key person for this, a person who has influence beyond Indonesia's borders is Amman Abderachman who is really the chief ideologue for ISIS. A brilliant propagandist himself, a superb Arabic language skills able to translate within very short space of time major ISIS texts and get them on the Indonesian social media. He's in maximum security confinement, jail in Indonesia but that doesn't stop him from getting his messages out. And so you can see the different levels in which ISIS is working at. One of the things ISIS has done in the last few months is enforce a kind of ideological conformity. There was really quite a broad range of views and Southeast Asia traditionally has been a place of derivative jihadist thinking. There's been a lot of reproduction of views and concepts that have come from particularly the Middle East to a lesser extent South Asia. But in the last few months we've seen people Amman Abderachman who have had views that are not exactly consonant with that of ISIS and he's been forced to repent twice in fact in public for stepping out of line from the official views. So this is one way in which social media is being used to try to get some alignment with the official ISIS message. The anti-ISIS info wars and this is really my final slide. This is really going from what or second last slide from what Steve was saying. Regional governments I think have largely failed in their social media messaging against ISIS and it's usually political or doctrinal factors that lie at the heart of this. In many countries the emphasis governments decide indeed very much as the Australian government and lots of other governments decide the emphasis is on moderate Islam and the problem is that moderate so-called Islamic leaders have almost no traction amongst radicalising communities. Governments are doing this because it's less politically risky for them or it's more congenial for their own orientation. Singapore has the same issue again. They could be using salafist preachers who are non-violent who use a language that's quite similar to what the jihadists use but that goes against other tenets that they hold dear and so they don't want to be seen to be empowering highly conservative voices. So therefore they miss out on an opportunity to have the most effective possible campaigns. A lot of the, and we can see similar things in Malaysia, we had these sham things such as a global moderate Muslim movement that Najib leads in Malaysia but domestically he's engaged in a highly sectarian campaign that's raised religious tensions considerably. So a lot of the online radicalisation efforts are also very poorly informed. There's often a dearth of really high quality research about what factors are critical in radicalising young Muslims and these campaigns are just taking stabs in the dark at what might work. Again, often driven by moderate messages rather than things that are going to be really attuned to the people most at risk. And there's consistently, last few comments, and there's consistently this denial of the opportunities to salafist groups to have an effect and we know just looking at what the jihadists are saying online, they're responding to salafist criticism as much as anything. That's a thing that really upsets them very often. And Steve has spoken about most of these issues but Horaro before talked about propaganda traps and the Malta brothers really seem to have a strategic trap for the Philippines government in Marawi was encouraged to draw into excessive action which would become a propaganda opportunity for them and that's exactly what they did by aerial bombing Marawi by so extensively destroying the city and that's created an enormous amount of grievance among the evacuees from Marawi. There are concerns that when the city is rebuilt it will be more Christianised than what it was beforehand. All of these things are handing material to ISIS and so we only need to look at these kinds of activities the regional governments are doing to realise that why they're so comprehensively losing the information wars. Thank you. I think you've painted a increased threat environment in the Philippines and South East Asia more broadly and given that Australia tends to view terrorism from an immediately South East Asian lens first, I was wondering if we could get a little bit from the two of you about what you think the likelihood of that increased threat pushing directly towards Australia interests and how much it orientates more towards local problems and local challenges. Well, I mean, one of the things that is somewhat obvious is the extent to which there are a lot of Australian citizens in the Philippines that are very vulnerable. They tend to be on beach resorts which are reachable by the Abu Saif and so on and so forth and we know how much trouble it's one single kidnapped Australian can cause for the Australian government. But more generally, I think that the ability of the jihadis to take and hold territory and, you know, hold territory that is getting direct assistance from Australia and direct assistance from the United States. I mean, they've won an enormous propaganda victory and it's going to take a long time for that to start fading away. And they are reacting, you know, you can't kill an idea by killing lots of people and they've killed some 800 of them but they're already reacting tactically. So the same sort of thing is going to continue. Now, in some sense, you know, there's the real question of in the short term, I mean, what are you going to worry about North Korea with its atomic bombs or the jihadis? And I worry about North Korea. But I live in the Philippines and I worry much more about the violent extremists than I do about North Korea. Yes, and I've got a lot to add to that. I don't think there's a great risk, I can never entirely rule it out, but I don't think there's a great risk of some of the people who may have been trained in the Philippines or even in places in Indonesia coming to Australia for an operation. I think that's just too difficult. The risk factors are too great and one of the things we know about terrorists is that they're reasonably pragmatic when it comes to those kinds of things. But as Steve was saying, the real risk is for Australians in the region. We have about a million Australians a year who go to Bali on holidays. Bali is a far harder terrorist site now or site for terrorist operations than it was back in 2005, the last attack. But nonetheless, you would have to say that that's probably places like that, possibly even Phuket or other places in Indonesia where tourists congregate and they would be fairly high risk areas. So I think that's, it's Australians in the region rather than Australians on home soil who are likely to be targets of that. I do, I'm still yet to be convinced by the arguments for why Australia should be having those Orion aircraft during the surveillance in the Philippines because I imagine that the US must already have had really extensive intelligence assistance to, it was done so we are shown to have a role in the region and that may not necessarily be a bad thing but it also means that for ISIS it looks like it's a crusade as part of this centuries old Christian crusade against Muslim countries. The more countries like Australia get involved in that even if in a small way the more in which that is playing into the propaganda war of ISIS. So I just wonder if the benefits come from that actually are likely to outweigh the potential deleterious effects. I would say that everything I hear is that the government of Bangladesh is precisely where the government of the Philippines was back in 2012, 2013 in utter denial and so I think that increases the risk all by itself. I think among people who study this people like Andrew Self who is formerly of the ANU have a scepticism. In the past, in the early 2000s we know that there were Rehingya organisations, Arnau was one of them which attended a regional meeting of Jihadist organisations that Jami's Llamia convened but it's not clear that they knew exactly what the purpose was. They might have only attended once of the three meetings but nonetheless this kind of information was used by shall I call them the alarmist terrorist scholars who are always looking to ramp up a threat not always in a balanced way but they used this to say see regional Jihadism is now spreading to Western Myanmar and into Bangladesh. There are also reports of their Rehingya that worked with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. A lot of that material in their al-Qaeda links into the Rehingya refugee communities. I've seen very little evidence strong evidence in the public domain for that. There are a few journalists who have pedalled this line but a lot of it comes down to hearsay or information from regional intelligence agencies that haven't provided any documentation to really prove the case. So I think we have to be careful. For one, the Myanmar government they don't refer to them as Rehingya they refer to them as Bengali terrorists and the more in which the international community, the international media uses word terrorism to describe this ARSA group that attacked these police posts the more it actually plays into that narrative and deflects some of the pressure on Myanmar government to stop the exodus so that would be my fear.