IS top commander in South-East Asia gravely hurt

MANILA: Hapilon, who had planned to set up an IS caliphate in Mindanao, was wounded in military airstrikes.

The top commander of the Islamic State (IS) in South-East Asia has been gravely wounded in airstrikes by security forces hunting him in the southern Philippines, the Philippine military said on Sunday.

General Eduardo Ano told reporters that Isnilon Hapilon, chief of the Abu Sayyaf militant group, needed a blood transfusion.

“He will die if he does not get proper medical treatment. He is bedridden. He can’t walk yet. He is being carried around on an improvised stretcher by four of his men,” said Gen Ano, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. He cited intelligence provided by soldiers and civilians providing information.

Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Saturday that Hapilon was wounded in airstrikes last Wednesday in the mountain town of Butig in Mindanao, 800km south of Manila.

Hapilon, 50, was indicted in Washington for his involvement in the 2001 kidnapping of three Americans from a resort on the western Philippine island of Palawan in 2001.

The militants later beheaded one captive in their stronghold on Basilan, while another hostage died in the crossfire with soldiers during a rescue operation in 2002.

The third American was freed. Hapilon, who has a US$5mil (RM22.1mil) bounty on his head from the US, has pledged allegiance to IS, which has endorsed him as “amir (or prince) for South-East Asia”, according to a 2016 report by Jakarta-based think-tank Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.

“South-East Asians in Syria have pledged their loyalty to him,” the report said. A video released in 2014 claimed that four battalions of militants from the Philippines and Malaysia had merged into a single unit under a leadership council now steered by Hapilon.

Hapilon was based in Basilan, but Lorenzana said he moved to Lanao del Sur province, 300km east, in a bid to establish an IS presence there.

Basilan and nearby Sulu island, both Abu Sayyaf strongholds, were considered too small and remote for an IS “wilayat”, or province. — The Straits Times/Asia News Network