US
drones circle over the Philippines By Jacob Zenn
A United
States-supported airstrike that destroyed with
causalities an Abu Sayyaf hideout on the remote
island of Jolo in the southern Philippines
represented the first known use of the unmanned
aerial assault craft in the Armed Forces of the
Philippines (AFP) counter-insurgency operations
against terrorism-linked rebel groups.
The
drone attack early this month reportedly killed 15
Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah operatives,
including three most-wanted terrorist leaders -
Zulkifli bin Hir (alias Marwan), Gumbahali Jumdail
(alias Doc Abu), and Mumanda Ali (alias Muawayah)
- and raised the level of US-Philippine military
cooperation.
Marwan was the most wanted
foreign terrorist in the Philippines, with the US
State Department offering a US$5 million reward
for information leading to his capture. A
Malaysian national, he was
formerly a member of the
Indonesia-based JI's central command, known as the
markaziyah, and a founder of the Kumpulan
Mujahidin Malaysia, an organization comprised
mostly of former Soviet-era Afghan mujahideen who
advocated for the overthrow of then Malaysian
prime minister Mahathir Mohammed's government and
the creation of an Islamic State.
In 2002,
Marwan fled from Malaysia to Indonesia, where he
reportedly conspired in the October 12, 2002,
bombings on the resort island of Bali with the
help of his older brother, Rahmat, who reportedly
provided him with radios and cash used in carrying
out the attack.
In August 2003, Marwan
fled to the southern Philippine island of
Mindanao, where he received the protection of Abu
Sayyaf and the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front
(MILF). Since then, he was based in southern
Mindanao training Abu Sayyaf members in
explosives, according to news reports.
Muawayah was a Singaporean military
officer of Indian descent who also allegedly
participated in the 2002 Bali bombing and had a
$50,000 reward for his arrest offered by the US.
Like Umar Patek, the JI operative who was captured
in Pakistan half a year before Osama Bin Laden's
assassination, Marwan and Muawayah are known to
have maintained contacts with Al Qaeda cells
operating in Asia and the Middle East while they
trained local fighters in the jungles of southern
Mindanao.
Doc Abu, a member of Mindanao's
Tausug ethnic group, was one of Abu Sayyaf's most
senior figures and had outstanding warrants for
his arrest for 21 counts of kidnapping, including
in Sipadan, Malaysia in 2000 and at the Dos Palmas
resort in Palawan, Philippines in 2001. His alias,
Doc Abu, was derived from the time he spent as a
medic for the rebel Moro National Liberation Front
(MNLF) until it signed a 1996 peace pact with the
government. After 1996, he joined Abu Sayyaf and
emerged as one of its commanders.
The
trio's precise location was uncovered when local
villagers reported their presence to the
Philippine military. The villagers may have been
part of a known AFP program in Mindanao where
locals are hired to work undercover to track down
Abu Sayyaf and JI militants. Aware that Jumdail
has previously portrayed himself as a doctor when
hiding out in local villages, they traveled to the
village where Doc Abu was staying and pretended to
seek medical treatment. The villagers then left a
sensor at his hideout that was used to pinpoint
the coordinates for the aerial attack.
Tracking Doc Abu, Marwan, and Muawayah was
also made possible by months of AFP intelligence
gathering, which in a separate air strike on
October 2011 killed Marwan's aide, Madarang Sali,
and three other Abu Sayyaf fighters. Marwan and
Muawayah managed to escape the earlier assault,
which is believed to have been launched by a
Filipino manned assault craft. Help
from above The aerial strike was
significant not only because it killed three top
JI and Abu Sayyaf leaders but also because it
underscored the effectiveness of the AFP's
adoption of drones in its battle against
Mindanao-based terror groups. The AFP has
traditionally relied on ground operations against
terror groups, exercises that retired Lt Gen
Benjamin Dolorfino recently referred to as
"counter-productive" because they "cause locals to
have negative perceptions of the military".
As history has shown, ground operations
carry the risk of ambush and massive displacement
of civilian populations. Most recently, on October
18, 2011, 100 MILF fighters reinforced Abu Sayyaf
operatives in a battle where 13 AFP special force
troops were killed. In contrast to previous years,
where the AFP's counter-insurgency operations have
often alienated local villagers, advocates of the
drone strike on Doc Abu, Marwan, and Muawayah note
that it was facilitated through the assistance and
cooperation of local villagers.
The
airstrike, which was reported to have been US-led
and launched by a drone that tracked the sensor
planted at the Abu Sayyaf hideout, has however
raised political hackles in Manila. One Philippine
representative, Luz Ilagan, has called for the
abrogation of the US Visiting Forces Agreement and
an end to US military intervention in national
affairs in the wake the attack. That agreement
bans the US, the Philippines' former colonial
ruler, from establishing permanent military bases
in the country.
Ilagan has since called
for a probe into what she referred to as the
"extensive and intensive intrusion of the US
military in AFP operations". She also said, "If
these reports are true, then US troops are
participating in and conducting operations beyond
what is allowed in the Visiting Forces Agreement
and directly transgressing our sovereignty. More
importantly, their participation in these
operations is a potential magnet for the
Philippines' participation in a brewing
US-instigated regional conflict."
Underscoring the still strong nationalist
sentiment against US troops being stationed on
Philippine soil, Ilagan's opposition to US
involvement in the fight against Abu Sayyaf comes
despite the fact that she is a former victim of
the group's terror tactics. She was wounded in the
November 2007 bombing of the National Assembly in
Quezon City, which killed one of Ilagan's staff
members, her driver and a fellow congressional
representative.
The Philippines National
Police claimed that Abu Sayyaf was responsible for
the bombing, though that interpretation has since
been contested.
Certain congressional
representatives believe that the country's
security forces exploit the Abu Sayyaf for their
own purposes - in this case to boost military ties
with the US in a wider bid to counterbalance China
- at the expense of national sovereignty. Despite
Ilagan's and other nationalist group protests, the
US has already announced plans to increase its
fleet of unmanned drones by 30% in the
Philippines.
As in Somalia and other
conflict zones, drones will reportedly be deployed
to help the US and AFP locate kidnapping victims,
such as Warren Rodwell, an Australian national who
has been held by Abu Sayyaf since December 2011,
thus extending the unmanned vehicle's use beyond
targeted assassinations towards search and
rescue-type missions.
Jacob Zenn
is a lawyer and international security analyst
based in Washington DC. He writes regularly on
Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Nigeria and runs
an open-source research, translation, and due
diligence team through http://zopensource.net/.
He can be reached at jacobzenn@gmail.com.
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