Asian nations urged to curb Daesh at its roots

Jesus Dureza

MANILA: Daesh must be countered at its inception and the conflict in the Philippine city of Marawi is an “eye opener” from which other countries should learn how to defeat violent extremism, a senior adviser to President Rodrigo Duterte has told Arab News.
The terrorist group “should not be allowed to incubate and mutate. And more importantly, the root cause as to why so many people, especially the youth, are attracted to or resort to violent extremism, must be addressed,” said Jesus Dureza.
Fighting is raging in the Mindanao island city between Philippine security forces and two Daesh affiliates, the Maute group and Abu Sayyaf. It began in May, when government forces launched an offensive to capture the Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon.
Violent extremism is an emerging problem for the Philippines and other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Dureza said. ASEAN, established in 1967 and comprising the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, is scheduled to meet in November.
Even when the Marawi crisis is over, “the problem has only begun,” Dureza said.
“It is not only the physical reconstruction of destroyed Marawi. The more difficult task is the social healing and mending of broken relationships resulting from violence.”
Earlier, at a regional symposium on humanitarian issues in the ASEAN region, Dureza said the Marawi siege was an “eye opener” on a “new game that has no rules on humanitarian law, human rights or respect for non-combatants.
“We should draw lessons from this so we can improve on how to jointly handle similar situations that will eventually become bigger and more threatening if we, in the ASEAN, continue to consider it less important,” he said.
Dureza said modern technology had been an effective tool in countering extremists in combat, but at a great price. “We see missiles, smart bombs and drones able to kill the enemy efficiently and quickly. With all this technological advancement, we lose the humanity part. Sometimes, we forget what effect it has on victims, especially innocent civilians.”
A leading security expert, Col. David S. Maxwell, said Daesh was struggling to survive defeat in Syria and Iraq, and was therefore “trying to keep its ideology alive by spreading to other countries where it is taking advantage of the conditions of political resistance that weaken governments and provide safe havens for training, recruitment, and eventual resurrection of its quest for the caliphate.
“This is what appears to have attracted them to Mindanao,” Maxwell said in a recently published article. He said Abu Sayyaf and the Maute group had embraced Daesh ideology “to enhance their legitimacy and gain recruits, resources, and respect.”
Maxwell is associate director of the Center for Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is a retired US Army Special Forces colonel who served in the Philippines.
In his article, Maxwell said the nature of the problem in the Philippines was not solely a security threat, and while the Marawi siege was a lightning rod that brought focus on Daesh, “it is only a symptom of the underlying problem.”