On to Asia: Islamist militants getting stronger beyond Mideast

It doesn’t mean that the phenomenon is the same, or that the United States’ response to it should be the same, but it does appear that militant Islamist organizations, hitherto predominantly active in Iraq and Syria, have become recently more of a problem in Asia, including in the Philippines and Indonesia.

There is now even talk of the establishment of an Islamic Asian caliphate, parallel to the one theoretically based in Raqqa, Syria.

An attack on a casino in Manila Thursday that took some 37 lives may or may not have been a terrorist event. What is clear, however, is that the assault and at least partial occupation of the city of Marawi, population 200,000, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao is the work of Islamic organizations, the Maute group and Abu Sayyaf, a long-term enemy of the government in Manila.

Abu Sayyaf has been around since 1991, has challenged the Philippine government before, and is difficult to dislodge, let alone eliminate, given its base in the islands’ 4 percent Muslim minority. This time, the government and forces of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, notorious already for his murderous handling of the country’s drug addicts and dealers, are finding the incursion into Marawi difficult to handle. Thousands of Philippine Armed Forces personnel are already involved in the effort.

With generally good reason, Americans tend to think of militant Islam as a Mideast phenomenon. Starting with some of the Palestinian militant organizations, as example, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, arising from Arab organizations directing their activities against Israeli occupation in Palestine, the whole militant Islamic effort metastasized massively following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the inept occupation that followed. Al-Qaida more or less morphed into the Islamic State and now U.S. efforts are directed toward putting the IS out of business in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are important populations of Muslims, susceptible to radicalization, in Asian countries like Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and the Philippines, not to mention the ’Stans of the former Soviet Union. These Asian Muslims number an estimated 1.4 billion and most of them are Sunnis, like the Islamic State’s leadership and adherents.

Asian countries like the Philippines troubled by Islamic militants will undoubtedly seek U.S. support in combating them, citing the 2001-vintage so-called U.S. Global War on Terrorism. Organizations like the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf are not so large nor so powerful that national governments cannot take the necessary measures to contain or counteract them. They should do that. Unlike NATO, this is not a burden that the United States has agreed to share, particularly when the governments of the countries whose populations include them have themselves not made the effort to deal with the problems they present.