 to us. Our second speaker today is Georgie Engelbrecht from the EU International Monitoring Team in Mindanao. Currently in Mindanao still, yes. Yes. Okay. And his talk today is entitled Permutations of Terror, Cycles of Insurgency in the Southern Philippines. That's welcome, Georgie. Great. Good afternoon and thanks very much for having me here. Let me maybe before I start with the actual presentation just to bounce back to what Professor Abinales has mentioned in the morning that basically when we work in Mindanao, when we work on Mindanao, it's a gray zone, it's a gray area, but it's also full of contradictions, I guess. And the best example could be just the end of the presentation, what we heard about the BOL as a bulwark against violent extremism. I just checked out something my Filipino friends were sharing on Facebook and the headline on CNN is ISIS in the Philippines, former Abu Sayyaf militant warrants of worse to come. Now that's not a new statement because regularly we hear about it's only getting worse. So by that reckoning, we must already enter the stage of apocalypses, but here we are and we're not there yet. But the discourse just keeps on being repeated and I guess there are many indicators, things go on well, but we also have some early warning signs, so to speak. The two photos were taken respectively in Lanaudel Sur. On the left, it's from a municipality called Malabang in Lanaudel Sur. We heard about it also in the morning. And on the right was a graffiti from Marawi City actually before the siege. And also in terms of contradictions, I would just gladly like to share the story with you about a young man who went by the name of talk boy Magid. That fellow was basically one of the founders of the Pan-IS affiliated groups in Mindanao. He was responsible for the logistics and the coordination of things which led to the Marawi siege and was considered by many circles as basically one of the most evil guys in town or in the country. But on the other hand, there's also pretty much another side of him. The first time I heard about him actually was in 2014 or even 2015 in the context of a town hall fiesta in a Filipino town. So apparently what happened was that there were two moral teenagers who surprisingly got drunk and started to beat up another fellow who used to be a Christian. They took his watch and basically really roughened him up quite a bit. And apparently talk boy was very sad about this because he told them this is not how you behave actually. So he disciplined them by sending them for 10 days up to a mountain in some sort of improvised prison and hoped that maybe there will be better human beings even for people who are different than them. So most people describe that individual as a very charming fellow and yeah, he later was killed in a raid. But interestingly there's another story which says that the factor which led to his demise was something like a romantic miscalculation because he made a wrong move with the wrong woman and that upset some people and led to the police finding out about his hideout. So basically it's interesting to see that even a jihadist or a terrorist like him, there are also many points of view how to look at it. And that's basically also more or less about my presentation. Maybe you heard about it that exactly one week ago there was an incident on the island of Sulu when an explosion occurred close to military detachment. Initially the feedback was it was just a regular encounter between God knows ASG or maybe even the MNLF and the military. Turns out it's still more complicated because soon enough ISIS claimed that basically this attack was perpetrated by one of their affiliated groups and site website also published it. And the interesting part here is that apparently at least one of the perpetrators, because there were two, was a local meaning a Filipino, a Tausuk. If that is correct and so far the authorities say it is, it would be the first case of a Filipino suicide bomber in the country because the last attacks which we had in January in the Church of Holo were arguably done by Malaysians or Indonesians, foreigners at least. And the same thing occurred even last year in another town. So again there's the question what does it mean? Is this a game changer or is it actually something like we can even track down from history because maybe you're also familiar with the Joramentados, the quote unquote suicide warriors or Parang Sabil in Malay dialect who fought the Spanish and the Americans through basically running amok in a very organized way and hitting the military really hard. So back to the question of we had now the Marawi siege and after that everybody was basically panicking what will happen? Will ISIS now really come to Mindanao and make things worse than they already are? And I think one factor was that the mushrooming of programs with respect to preventing violent extremism and countering it was really, I mean, prevalent on the island. However, essentially not much has changed. On the contrary, some people argue that basically all these groups lost out in Marawi and they couldn't re-stage and reform their strength, they could not fight anymore, they're significantly weakened. But again, blasts like the one last week and even before and the ongoing armed conflict also contribute to this cognitive dissonance of what's actually going on. So I asked myself the question, well everybody talks about ISIS or Daesh but if we break it down to the local context of Mindanao, can we actually find something out about these groups? Why did some pledge allegiance? What did it mean and why did they occur in some part of Mindanao and why not in others? So basically I looked at that and it's pretty much a working draft which I conducted more or less in my spare time so it's far from perfect but just some food for thought probably for all of us. So I'll just be raising some preliminary introductory things then focus entirely on some case studies and just mention briefly something about the implications. So of course I think most of you are familiar with the impact of the Marawi siege. We have the official statistics which by no means have to be correct especially when it comes to the death toll of civilians. I myself was in Marawi in the morning of the fateful day but left before noontime through coincidence or fate I don't know but what unfolded I think has been reported worldwide and it used to be basically a wake-up call from many especially also the military and other groups. The many first ones with related to the siege the first time of massive urban combat and some point out it was the first time for ISIS to capture area and hold it but if you deconstruct the sentence actually it's far from correct because what does it mean hold it essentially the Maltese and their allies were holding out against the military they did not introduce Sharia per se or govern that city because from day one it used to be basically a war no time of governance at all so that maybe can also be looked into like that and of course the fact that the city is far from reconstructed rehabilitated but even here again conventional wisdom will tell us now recruiting sprees going on people are trying to get more and more people and things will get really worse but if you look on the ground it is not necessarily pointing towards that direction because the newly designated leader of the Maltese has been killed the recruitment fades out suddenly from the discourse and the assumption is actually not much is happening and also I believe that whenever we or we read about ISIS in the Philippines it raises this impression that there's an evil mastermind somewhere like the emir collected all these groups and organized something but I believe if you look at Bansamo history in general we also see that the resistance against the colonial powers or even the colonial and the post-colonial state was never ever properly centralized so I believe even with respect to these groups we can also make an argument that oftentimes they were disconnected there were of course similarities but essentially a fighter in Lanao has probably also some other agendas then the youngster who is studying at the university in Cotabato city or a fellow who is maybe in Maguindanao or in Davao area and one example which struck me was the case of Mr. D. I mean I just called him like that he basically was a college student member of the BIFF what happened was that he joined the siege for a few days and then returned passing by security without any problems apparently it was just one guy who signed off to fight and when you ask him why did you sign up he said well I'm not so really sure but I wanted to see how it is meaning you don't necessarily hear a lot of ideology there or even the greed factor the fact that he has been paid or we can assume maybe he just wanted to shoot some guns but he could do the same essentially just one hour away from his hometown in the marshlands of Maguindanao but he didn't he went to Marawi he thought he returned and here we are stuck with finding out what it actually meant now to some of the case studies I will basically argue that discourse and also the reality of ISIS or Daesh entering Mindanao came at a certain time and it occurred when the external ideology clicked with the internal post peace agreement fragility now it sounds a bit complicated but basically it's all about the peace agreement in 2014 that was the time when ISIS made also global headlines through for instance Mosul etc and at that time of course many expectations were rising across the Baksimoron just like now with the creation of the BTA and at that time former president Ramos actually said that 100 Filipinos went to Syria to fight that statement was never ever referred to again it was never qualified it was never contradicted it was never withdrawn it was one of those beautiful statements which fly around the Philippines and they sound interesting and then basically no one really knows what's happening and the mayor of Kottabato city the place where I've been living for the last three years also said there are 1000 ISIS right now recruited there which absolutely was not true as well meaning to say that this fragility which existed and where the ISIS affiliated groups spread for me it was basically inherently local and we need to look at exactly how we're conditions on these difficult different areas if you look at this timeline it's a bit improvised here these are basically significant events in the in the peace process between the government and the MILF in the last years if you want to connect the dots you can also enter IS relevant relevant events here as well and then you see some sort of flow here we have Duterte becoming the president in 2016 and just well actually before his presidency the first attacks by ISIS in the neighboring countries of Indonesia and Malaysia and the interesting part between all of those events the red lightnings would indicate actually violence organized armed violence between the government and these various cells or armed groups who have pledged allegiance and obviously the question is what will happen now and how will the prediction be will the BOL be really afford of security and make things better or will it actually be the advent of something worse and basically coming back to the to the to the cracks of local conditions I have identified three which play a role number one ISIS entered areas where we already had armed conflicts and violence it did not occur simply in peaceful situations number two once one of those IS affiliated groups engaged the state more violence automatically came about certain path dependency was also visible what I termed as once a fight always a fight a repetition of the same communities being displaced the same strategies being used by the military and the same ways of destruction occurring in the same municipalities and why certain areas were affected I believe that it also has something to do with the level of contestation between also the groups of the morose in a certain area wherever the MILF let's say controls an area and it's a strong bulwark they can easily control their communities against this external influence accordingly but where there's a space and niches for other groups to exploit where the MILF is an example doesn't have the monopoly of violence or of legitimacy that's where things become complicated and regionally I think this is also what distinguishes Mindanao from let's say southern Thailand in southern Thailand we have many different groups organizationally divided fair enough but ideologically I think they're all on the same page they do not want this ideology to enter because they have their traditional Shafi approach to Islam which seems like an anti-serum to this thing which comes from the outside and I heard from colleagues work that it's basically it ISIS will is was considered by the crisis group for instance as a phantom menace it would not necessarily trickle down there now for every three of the factors and we have an example and basically I will focus the first two briefly on the BFF in Mindanao and the third for the multi-group in Lana of the Sur. Okay so the first one is no IS without small wars the battle for Datu Salibu or forever war in the swamp why swamp because Datu Salibu is basically very marshy and swampy municipality perfect for guerrilla warfare but unfortunately very imperfect for governance it was traditionally based of the MILF but also the Biff the splinter which came about 2010-11 properly into making but the Biff existed basically as a very militant moral armed group no black flags no ideology no extremism whatsoever what happened was that in late 2015 this guerrilla movement initiated some stronger moves and the military retaliated massively so for around two months or three months these areas which are basically not very big it's more or less one town and its outskirts were completely engulfed in warfare airstrikes IEDs bombs whatsoever and during this time the Biff or this group set up actually the links with an commander who later pledged allegiance to the ash and it worked basically through things which we also heard about before through the narrative of being a victim and victimization and clans family relationships marrying into armed group social systems etc and the fact that the government didn't necessarily adjust its use of force contributed to this very precarious situation and the Biff which was reborn out of this battle later even engaged the MILF in a fight for moral legitimacy of the of the moral people just to give you an example on average at the height of the conflict we had 600 to 1600 families displaced and with this campaign ISIS basically started to spread within the province because that town was basically located at the intersection of marshes of rivers and through the flow of people the ideas also spread so from a general guerrilla or anti guerrilla fight it has transformed and morphed into something more deeper now once the war always or the evolution of the military group in boutique what I found sometimes very disturbing or not so much accurate is that people tended to explain Marawi in hindsight as big master plan that everything was planned in advance for me I would disagree with that opinion and say actually it was a very complicated process and well we probably need to dissect that one now that looks very complicated but probably you can just focus on the red parts on top which basically distinguishes the evolution of the military group into three phases the genesis of the formation the battles of boutique and the path to Marawi and for me the mountain IS affiliation was basically developed in the second part basically when this originally clan based locally motivated political clan militia started to engage the government and the government strike back and in other things flawed into equation the mountains developed in a certain direction which then laid the way clear for Marawi. I do believe in the beginning there was definitely an ideological element of that group but on the other hand they also tactically cooperated with drug lords maybe not to the extent as president Duterte would like to point it out but nevertheless it was a very complicated affair so these battles occurred three times in a year every battle was worse and whereas in the beginning there was no talk about foreigners and no talk about ISIS slowly but surely even the imagery ended the whole conflict meaning Christian workers were kidnapped put into orange overalls the imagery of Guantanamo right and basically executed and then at some point what we had was that Isnilon hapillon from the islands landed in Lanell and slowly but surely things pointed towards what should unfold in Marawi just a few months later again the malty started as a clan based militia and I believe that the willingness to raise the stakes in their war was basically a very continuous process the radicalization was not there from the start I think it entered slowly but surely into the game and basically to look at them as agents of the ISIS ideology from the Middle East just because of the education of the Malta brothers abroad or just because they had also connections to former GI Jamiah terrorists doesn't give us the full story because essentially they also cooperated with people who were pretty much not involved in so-called halal activities but rather the opposite of it and the third example would be from a town in Magindanau province Sharif Sidona which is basically one of the most conflict affected towns in Magindanau which is characterized by the fact that it's basically one big failing municipality we have different power levels different power poles we have a formal governance system an informal government system it all clashes into this mashup of no war and no peace until recently hardly any local officials even in the municipality the military regularly conducting operations there the enemies of the military persistently re-revenging or or exerting a counter attack and basically per year if you calculated there could have been six to eight military operations per year with the number of ten displacements so almost let's say once a month you have basically a big part of the community leaving and 60% of the whole municipality was conflict affected since 2012 so this was the town where some of the elements of the beef tried to put up the black flag on the town hall it was completely useless but it was an effort to be symbolic I reckon and well it kind of worked because many recruits came actually from that place and if you live in a state of failing governance continuous war then no wonder that the people come actually from from there and if you look at for instance incidents of vertical conflict from the government against some of these groups you can see that the neighbors of Sharif Sidona actually do well I mean the peace dividends there are evident but in the town itself in the last two years it's again violence is on the rise and unfortunately the answer of the security sector is that well we have more operations which then result in more narratives of being a victim and more recruitment for these groups so if you look at basically the the the armed groups which pledged allegiance I believe most of these conditions had to be fulfilled in order for them really to to be organized locally I think here a very interesting factor is also the Abu Sayyaf because these days many foreign entities look at them as almost an ISIS outfit and I think we can distinguish Abu Sayyaf based on the two islands in the archipelago we have Basilan and we have Sulu the blast last week was perpetrated accordingly by a commander from Sulu Basilan is relatively quiet people even say if we want to go there for research arguably no one would be kidnapped actually because there's a huge buy-in from everybody to keep the peace and this is now being sold and being narrated as well the way how to defeat these groups and I think it has something to do with this local contestation elements because before the mayors the MILF and the ASG the Abu Sayyaf and other strong men had all different interests they all wanted to have a piece of the cake and sometimes they didn't get it so they resorted to protecting the bad guys or turning into bad guys now apparently it has changed for a variety of factors everybody in Basilan seems to be on the same boat and their estimates that there's only maybe 15 real ASG people there now and they're hiding on the mountains and just hoping to get by getting sick from stomach ache and basically that's about it but in Sulu it's different the first two conditions are still the same there's still an armed conflict and the eastern ISIS group which engaged the government but people are still very much divided the politicians the traditional elites maybe Bhaitan and other people everybody tries to rock to find out his own or her own agenda and that results in the fact that the ASG or this group can still thrive and survive potentially be used and also use its constituencies as well they're under pressure but they're still active whereas the ASG in Basilan and of course the Maltese were militarily almost defeated the BIF is still out there and as long as the country continues as long as the local governance is full of challenges I think it will still continue as well now the implications of that I have identified maybe five number one also for research and maybe finding policy responses we still have a lot of lack of data and analysis of recruitment patterns and the social systems and subsystems in Mindanao especially when when decisions to fund certain projects are being made I think it's very crucial to really look into the details and justify your statements with also data for instance we also have the paradox that some poor and misgoverned areas in Mindanao remain completely unaffected by IS and those are areas for instance where the MILF is basically controlling their barangays but it's also hard to control it because the community are so dispersed they cannot easily be coerced even by the MILF but they leave peacefully for the last five six years they're not being touched by the military and I think this is what it means to be normalized as normalization is a hugely popular word in the peace process right now so basically if you live a slowly but surely normalized life you can probably be resisting these these other trends but if your life still consists of waking up to the sounds of mortars that's probably a different story likewise what is actually happening now on the island I think before we heard the name of Kit Collier by by our colleague from Davao he was one of the first crisis group analysts who wrote an excellent reporter would highly recommend for everybody to read it because it's one of the best papers on the subject where he distinguished actually what do we do in Mindanao from the perspective of the government and even entities trying to help it are we looking for terrorists or are we trying to defeat an insurgency or is it like this gray area in between likewise the like I mentioned before we do have similarities between Mindanao and Thailand but we'll serve differences and even Malaysian Indonesia where the discourse about ISIS is also getting more and more relevant I think it's interesting to see how in Mindanao these groups are still more akin to armed groups rather than cells or individual lone wolves in the classical sense and I believe this is basically the legacy of this decades old conflict and as long as the armed groups will thrive this ideology can click so maybe it's not wrong to say that the solution would be to disarm all of them everybody but we all know it's pretty much impossible and lastly I believe if we look basically to the other parts of the world we have other situations of low intensity armed conflict where this ideology can morph into something very local where maybe all this fancy imagery from the Middle East will not apply but rather enter this very peculiar connection with local grievances and I believe the recent rise of IS in Khorasan in the northeast of Afghanistan and also the continuous violence in the Caucasus and even Nigeria is maybe something to to monitor to look into so thank you very much and yeah we can maybe talk about it later