Making Sense Of Terror

The marawi siege is the flashpoint of what terrorism research expert professor Rommel Banlaoi says is a pro blem we shouldn’ t have ignored when the maute group first made their presence felt.

- Allan P. Hernandez

Downplay the threat, and you underestimate the capability of enemy forces. You are not prepared to confront a situation that may have started small, but is now big.”

So observes Professor Rommel Banlaoi, chairman of the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research and director of the Center for Intelligence and National Security Studies. He is referring to an incident in 2015, when a black flag now commonly linked to ISIS was waved on the grounds of the Marawi State University in a demonstration of support for the international terrorist group.

The Maute Family of Lanao del Sur was pointed as the instigator, and Banlaoi says that the family also used the rally to recruit for what would become the Maute group, who with members of the Abu Sayyaf Group and other Islamist groups in Mindanao, and as recent reports have noted, some foreign nationals who our military believes are jihadists, is responsible for the Marawi siege.

“Some of those recruited were responsible for the Davao City bombing in September 2016,” Banlaoi says.

Banlaoi uses the word “downplay” because, until President Rodrigo Duterte himself declared on May 30, a week after fighting began in Marawi, that ISIS had been supporting the Maute Group, it had been the government’s stand that the MG was merely a bandit group trying to get the attention of ISIS in hopes of getting support, not least of it in terms of money. But Banlaoi, who has spent the last 17 years studying the phenomenon of terror and violence in Mindanao, saw it as a warning when the nascent MG began to make headlines back in 2015.