Radicalization doesn’t happen in a month. That’s the comment of both Malacañang and the Armed Forces of the Philippines following reports that the father-and-son tandem that massacred 15 people in Australia’s Bondi Beach had stayed for a month in the Philippines, mostly in the Davao Region, before going on their rampage.
Sajid Akram, 50, entered the Philippines on an Indian passport while his son Naveed, 24, used an Australian passport. Immigration records show that they arrived last Nov. 1 and left on Nov. 28. On Dec. 14, the two opened fire on a beach gathering of the local Jewish community in Sydney for Hanukkah, in what Australian officials have described as an antisemitic terrorist attack inspired by Islamic State ideology.
Foreign media reported that the two gunmen received “military-style training” while in the Philippines. The country was described by Australia’s national security agency, ASIO, as a hotspot for Islamic State East Asia. On its website, ASIO says “ISEA remains a deadly terrorist threat in the Philippines.”
This has been disputed by the AFP and Philippine security officials, who point out that the Islamist terror threat in Mindanao has in fact gone down significantly, with the former Abu Sayyaf hotbeds in Basilan and Sulu now cleared of the scourge.
Compared to the heyday of the Abu Sayyaf, the bombings staged by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front together with the Indonesian terror cell Jemaah Islamiyah and the Maute-led siege of Marawi in 2017, the threat of armed violence in Mindanao has in fact been dramatically reduced.
Philippine officials, however, cannot dismiss outright the significance of the month-long stay in Mindanao of the two gunmen before they staged the worst armed attack in Australia in nearly 30 years.
At the very least, Philippine authorities can try to find out what the Akrams did while in the country. There are still active Islamist groups in Mindanao, among them Dawlah Islamiyah. Even if the groups no longer pose a significant security threat to Filipinos, the country cannot afford to have a global image as a training ground for extremists.