Agents of death strike again
C&
OMBINED security forces have enforced a tight security ring around and inside Sulu in Mindanao, amid the lingering possibility that Monday’s twin suicide bombings near a plaza in Jolo capital town may not be the last of such daring and bloody attacks.
“There’s a possibility,” Maj. Gen. Corleto Vinluan, commander of the Western Mindanao Command (Westmincom), said when asked if some radicalized Muslims, or their followers, could mount
similar attacks in the near future. The latest suicide bombings left 15 dead and 64 others wounded, some seriously.
President Duterte was reported to be considering the declaration of martial law in Sulu, according to Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque, upon the recommendation of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).
“Although the recommendation has been made, the President has to be very careful that it will pass the scrutiny of both the legislative and the judicial branches of government,” Roque explained, adding the President might just be waiting for additional reports on the bombings before acting on the recommendation.
President Duterte, it will be recalled, had placed the entire Mindanao under martial law from 2017 to 2019 after Islamic terrorists stormed Marawi City.
“You could expect the President will give justice to those who died and were injured because of the incident, and fight terrorism in Sulu,” Roque said.
Radicalization
THE Jolo suicide bombing incidents—the fourth and fifth cases in just more than a year to rattle Sulu— also confirmed the radicalization by the Islamic State (IS) of some of the members of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and their followers as indicated by the latest attacks that were both carried out by two women.
“We are on double alert as we continue to hunt down the masterminds of the attacks,” Vinluan said, adding soldiers and policemen have been conducting raids on all possible terrorist lairs and holding relentless patrols, while undertaking target hardening measures on soft targets.
But the priority mission, according to Vinluan, is the manhunt operations against Mudzrimir “Mundi” Sawadjaan, an ASG subleader tagged as the brains behind the twin attacks.
Tactical shift
THE suicide bombings perpetrated by the two women, identified through their aliases “Nanah” and “Indanay,” wives of the late Norman Lasuca and Said Talha Jumsa alias Abu Talha, respectively, also marked a shift in the terrorists’ tactic of attacking areas of convergence rather than well-protected military camps.
While the bombings still targeted security forces, the latest attacks were carried out in an area of public convergence.
Sawadjaan is the nephew of Hatib Hadjan Sawadjaan, commander of the ASG who took over the helm of the IS in Mindanao after the death of ASG Commander Isnilon Hapilon, the “emir” of the IS in Southeast Asia who led the attack on Marawi City in 2017.
Vinluan did not discount the possibility that more members of the ASG, or the group’s followers, could have been radicalized by the IS and have been trained by its local affiliate for suicide bombings, saying such trainings happened between 2016 and 2018.
One of the so-called trainors, Abu Talha, the husband of Indanay, was killed in November last year by Army Scout Rangers. The military had tagged him as the IS’S liaison to the ASG where he had also served as its treasurer.
‘Upgrade’
ABU TALHA even reportedly upgraded the capability of the ASG in bomb making, while training suicide bombers, a fact validated by the death of his wife in one of the two latest attacks.
The successive attacks in Jolo on Monday were the fourth and fifth suicide bombings in Sulu since January this year, with the first one having been perpetrated by an Indonesian couple on the Jolo Cathedral while it was packed with churchgoers.
In July last year, Lasuca and a Caucasian man carried out suicide bombings on the headquarters of the Army’s 1st Brigade Combat Team at Barangay Kajatian in Indanan, Sulu, barely a month after the elite unit was deployed in the province.
“Lasuca was radicalized by the IS while he was with the group of Sawadjaan,” then Westmincom commander and now Army chief Lt. Gen. Cirilito Sobejana said at that time.
First Filipino bomber
THE listing of Lasuca as the first Filipino suicide bomber rattled security officials, as they confirmed that the idea of a suicide bombing had not only dawned upon the country, but had already seeped into the ranks of Filipino radicals, something that the government had been working to derail years before.
In September last year, a Caucasian-looking woman, who was believed to be an Egyptian, also carried out a suicide bombing on the outpost of the 35th Infantry Battalion at Barangay Tagbak, also in Indanan.
Both of the attacks targeted the camps of soldiers, prompting Sobejana to declare then that the terrorists are becoming bolder and more determined.
The attacks on the Jolo Cathedral and on the two military outposts were claimed by the IS.
In November also last year soldiers apprehended and killed at a checkpoint three suicide bombers, two of them an Egyptian father-and-son team identified as Abduramil and Abdurahman, who, along with a local Moro, were on their way to Jolo for a suicidebombing mission.
The trio came from the town of Maimbung when they were flagged down at Sitio Itawon, Barangay Kan Islam, Indanan.
“The terrorists, composed of two foreign terrorists and one local ASG member, were about to carry out their suicide-bombing mission in Metro Jolo when they were neutralized by the AFP during the implementation of a military operation intended to apprehend foreign terrorists in Sulu,” the military said at that time.
Recovered from them were two vests with explosives and triggering devices that were identical to the vest that was used by the suicide bomber during the attacks of the military outposts in Tagbak and Kajatian.
Could there be more?
FROM the 2019 attack at the Jolo Cathedral up to the twin bombings at the Jolo plaza, eight suicide bombers, including those apprehended and neutralized in the checkpoint, have been accounted for.
The number has already breached the figure of five suicide bombers whom the military earlier said it was still hunting right after Lasuca’s suicide attack.
Vinluan said they already knew about the plan to conduct suicide bombings in Sulu long before the latest twin attacks. But it happened.
“When it comes to terrorism, there is no such thing as an impenetrable barrier. So, although we were able to foil their several attempts in the past, sometimes it also happens. But this does not mean that our soldiers have been remiss of their job,” he said.
Sobejana earlier said that had the Army intelligence team not been killed by Jolo policemen while they were in pursuit of the two women suicide bombers in Jolo in late July, the attacks might have been preempted.
That killing of the Army intel team members, initially tagged a misencounter with Jolo cops but now widely suspected as a deliberate killing, has raised more chilling implications: could rogue cops in league with terrorists have deliberately gone after the soldiers because they were closing in on the suicide bombers? That is the subject of a thorough investigation. And it raises the ante of the war on terror.