Last week Donald Trump, the U.S. Republican Party’s presidential candidate for the upcoming polls, was at a rally in Portland, Maine, where he reiterated his stand against taking in immigrants from what he referred to as “terrorist nations.”
“We are letting people come in from terrorist nations that shouldn’t be allowed because you can’t vet them. You have no idea who they are. This could be the great Trojan horse of all time,” he said. “Terrorists, including members of the Islamic State extremist group, will sneak into the U.S. as refugees.”
Reports noted that Trump then went on to list several countries that he felt the U.S. should be wary of: Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
These countries, he said, had immigrants who were arrested for conducting or threatening to carry out violent attacks, teaching bomb-making to recruits, and otherwise supporting terror groups.
An Agence France-Presse (AFP) report observed that the countries enumerated by Trump were “mostly Muslim-majority nations.” The Philippines, of course, is not counted as a Muslim-majority country, as it is identified as predominantly Catholic.
Most Filipinos who migrate to the US are not Muslims but Catholics, though in Jun, 2015, 19-year-old Fil-Am named Justin Nojan Sullivan, reportedly a Muslim convert, was arrested in North Carolina and accused of trying to help the terror group ISIS.
Trump may have gone overboard in calling the Philippines (which, by the way, has allowed a Trump Tower to be built) a “terrorist nation” but his accusation isn’t entirely baseless.
In April this year, local terrorist group Abu Sayyaf — who are supposedly fighting for autonomy in Mindanao but whose members have been known more for kidnapping for ransom — beheaded Canadian national John Ridsdel.
Ridsdel, along with fellow Canadian Robert Hall, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad, and Filipina Marithes Flor, were kidnapped from the Holiday Oceanview Samal Resort on Samal Island on Sep 21, 2015, by the extremist group.
They initially demanded a ransom of PHP1 billion (or around US$21,306,060) for each hostage. The amount was brought down to PHP300 million (or around US$6.4 million). The ransom was never paid.
Two months after Ridsdel’s beheading, they also executed Hall.
Since the Abu Sayyaf Group was formed in the 1990s, the Philippine government has not stopped its efforrts against them, but, so far, it has failed to wipe out its members.
ASG has been described as a splinter group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a rebel faction that wants greater Muslim autonomy in Mindanao, the island located in the southern part of the Philippine archipelago.
The Washington Post recalled: “ASG kidnapped 20 people from a resort in 2001, including three Americans, one of whom was beheaded. In 2004, Abu Sayyaf carried out the worst terrorist attack in the history of the Philippines, targeting a ferry in Manila Bay, leaving 116 people dead. The following year, its militants carried out bombings across the country.”
Although the Abu Sayyaf has been considered as “largely subdued” at the moment, it’s reported ties with al-Qaeda and, subsequently, the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) is definitely cause for alarm.
An April 2016 TIME feature noted that “Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon — now styled Sheik Mujahid Abu Abdullah al-Filipini — has been appointed ISIS’s leader in the Philippines.”
Rohan Gunaratna, an international terrorism expert at S. Rajaratnam School of Security Studies in Singapore, told TIME that “it’s very likely that [Abu Sayyaf] will declare a satellite of the caliphate in the coming year. Once that is done, it will be much more difficult to dismantle these groups.”
By “groups,” Gunaratna is referring to other extremist outfits who have hosted training sessions with foreign terrorist operatives.
It may be recalled that in January 2015, Zulkifli bin Hir — a Malaysian described as a key facilitator between Indonesian and Filipino extremist groups — was cornered and killed in Mamasapano in central Mindanao.
The government paid a heavy price for that encounter. Forty-four members of the Philippine National Police’s Special Action Force were killed. The event stalled President Benigno Aquino III’s administration’s peace negotiations with the Moro separatists.
Decades before Mamasapano, the Philippines was also used as a launching pad for the Bojinka Plot, which was funded by none other than Osama bin Laden and Jemaah Islamiyah leader Riduan Isamuddin (also known as Hambali).
It turns out that Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, had moved to the Philippines sometime in the late 1980s to set up numerous financial fronts to benefit al-Qaeda.
The Bojinka plot was a three-pronged attack by Islamists Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for Jan 1995.
They planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II who was in the Philippines for the World Youth Day celebrations, blow up 11 airliners in flight from Asia to the United States to shut down air travel around the world, and crash a plane into the headquarters of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Fairfax County, Virginia.
The Bojinka Plot was disrupted after a chemical fire started at the apartment where the Yousef and his group were staying.
Cops later descended on Room 603 of Doña Josefa Apartment along Quirino Avenue in Malate, Manila. While Yousef and his other companions fled from the scene, a man named Abdul Hakim Murad was caught and later interrogated.
Yousef and Mohammed were unable to stage any of the three attacks.
The only fatality resulted from a test bomb planted by Yousef on Philippine Airlines Flight 434 which killed one person and injured 10 others in Dec 1994.
They had also planted other test bombs in various locations. These tests didn’t have any casualties.
While Yousef was later arrested in Pakistan, Mohammed went on to become the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.
With that said, we ask: Is the Philippines a terrorist nation?
For now, there is no clear answer. What we know is that there is a definite terrorist threat in the country that seems to be gaining strength. For people like Trump, that’s enough to get a country branded as a terrorist nation.
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