Bondi Beach suspects allegedly trained in the Philippines, where a decades-old Islamist insurgency is taking place

THE suspicious father and son in the terrorist attack on Jews gathered for a Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach, Australia, spent most of November in the Philippines, police said Tuesday. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the attack was “motivated by ISIS ideology“.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters investigators were still investigating the men’s reasons for travel and the exact destination between November 1 and 28. The Philippines’ Bureau of Immigration said Sajid Akram, 50, killed in the attack, and his 24-year-old son, widely identified by Australian media as Naveed Akram, had listed the southern city of Davao as the final destination of their trip.

Australian public broadcaster ABC reported that the men had undergone “military-style training” in the Asian country, citing security sources.

“People have traveled and networked between these groups, but very, very rarely,” Tom Smith, an academic director at the Royal Air Force College who studies security and terrorism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, told CBS News. “And it’s often exaggerated.”

The history of the Philippines with the Islamist insurgency

Islamist separatists have been operating in the southern Philippines for decades – it’s “an insurgency that’s been brewing for almost 100 years,” according to Smith.

He said two long-standing militant groups in the region – the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, known as the MILF, and the Moro National Liberation Front, or MNLF – were “sort of the grandfathers, the old rebel groups of the Islamist movement” in the region.

But, Smith said, “when you have two pretty strong activist groups, people are unhappy. So there are also many other, much smaller, fringe militant groups” in the region, including one called Abu Sayyaf, which is affiliated with ISIS.

Smith said these groups are “much smaller in number, but likely more vicious in their attacks on civilians and government officials.”

“Analysts now describe Abu Sayyaf as a fragmented remnant with residual ideological affinity to the Islamic State (IS), but little evidence of real operational leadership or sustained funding” from IS, Lucas Webber, senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Soufan Center, told CBS News.

Based in the remote Sulu archipelago in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf’s main activity is kidnapping for ransom, Smith said.

They “have wrapped themselves in the flag of ISIS, or the banner of al-Qaeda in the past, because they want to inflate their sense of danger. “They will behead people.”

It’s a view shared by the U.S. government, which designated Abu Sayyaf a terrorist organization in 1997, shortly after it became an offshoot of the region’s largest Islamist groups.

According to the US State Department’s latest assessment from 2023, it is “one of the most violent terrorist groups in the Philippines.”

“There have been reports that some factions of the Abu Sayyaf group are interacting and coordinating with ISIS-P. [ISIS-Philippines]including participating in attacks claimed by ISIS in the Sulu Archipelago,” the US government’s assessment said, adding that he “committed bombings, ambushes against security personnel, public beheadings, assassinationsextortion and kidnapping for ransom.

But Smith and Webber told CBS News that Abu Sayyaf and other regional factions have suffered a major blow in recent years.

“Years of military pressure [with U.S. support]” Webber said. “At the same time, small pockets of militants and former fighters with ISIS ideology remain in parts of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, and individuals can still be radicalized online or through personal connections. The main risk today is less a large “IS province” on Philippine soil than the possibility that remnant cells or sympathizers will attempt sporadic attacks or join in transnational plots if local conditions deteriorate or security efforts are neglected. »

Terrorist training camps?

The Associated Press on Tuesday cited Philippine military and police officials as saying there were no recent indications of foreign militants operating in the country’s south.

Smith said it would be very difficult for foreigners in the Philippines to travel to receive weapons training with Abu Sayyaf militants, especially if they are not fluent in the local language.

“They would stick out like a sore thumb,” Smith said. “When I go there, you know, I’m there with military support. I have a doctorate in the area, and even I stick out like a sore thumb.”

He said there were “a lot of armed people in Mindanao, in the Philippines, so they could go and practice, you know, shooting guns and so on. But that’s a long way from saying that this amounts to a terrorist camp.”

Referring to the Bondi Beach attack suspects, Smith said it was “much more likely that they could have grabbed some ex-rebels and gone somewhere in the jungle for a few weeks and learned how to shoot and clean their rifles and stuff like that”.

The two largest militant groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front – which are not affiliated with ISIS – “have training camps.