Young Muslims in Marawi City in the southern Philippine province of Lanao del Sur pledge their allegiance to IS in Iraq and Syria in these photos sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
Some 100 local Muslims have pledged allegiance or bai’ah to the Islamic State (IS) caliphate in Iraq and Syria on Friday following trends from radical jihadist groups in the Philippines.
Those who pledged their allegiance were mostly from here and took their mass oath-taking in a surprise announcement inside the Masjid Islamic Center, according to an insider.
An elderly Muslim cleric Jamil "Motawwa" Yahya, a former senior member of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and colleague of MILF chieftain Salamat Hashim, allegedly organized the mass oath-taking, according to an insider.
Yahya, an ethnic Maranao from Bayang town in Lanao del Sur, is reportedly affiliated with the Bangsamoro Labor Organization which is active in the United Arab Emirates and the entire Middle East region.
The insider said some of the participants were possibly unaware of IS and its violent campaign in Iraq and Syria. The photos of the gathering were uploaded in Facebook, but the faces of the participants and their children were blurred to protect their identities. It also showed masked men holding black flags similar to what IS inside the mosque.
Other sources said members of the Khilafah Islamiyah Mindanao-Black Flag Movement was reportedly behind the convergence.
An Afghan-cleric Humam Abdul Najid, who have ties with Southeast Asian terror organization Jema’ah Islamiyah, is also being linked to the secretive mass oath-taking, but all these allegations could not be immediately confirmed by authorities.
Local leaders and Muslim clerics in Lanao del Sur, one of five provinces under the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, declined to comment on the existence of Khilafah Islamiyah Movement in Marawi that continuously preach extreme jihadism and the Khilafah Islamiyah ideology since 2011.
Last month, a huge group of young Muslims in Marawi City also pledged their allegiance to IS.
Just recently, radical jihadists Abu Sayyaf group and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters vowed their allegiance to the IS’s Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the formerly known Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that had controlled large swathes in Iraq and Syria.
Dozens of Muslim detainees in Taguig City just outside Manila also pledged their allegiance to al-Baghdadi which authorities believed was organized by jailed leader of the radical Muslim-converts group Rajah Solaiman Movement Ahmad Santos. The whole event was also recorded on a cell phone video and uploaded to YouTube.
The Khilafah Islamiyah Movement which is being linked by police and military with the Abu Sayyaf and the BIFF, and the Al-Khobar group and RSM, was the first local jihadist vowed support to the ISIS.
Former president Fidel Ramos revealed that some 100 Filipinos joined the ISIS for training and eventually to return home and use their gained knowledge in propagating the IS ideology in Mindanao.
But the MILF, which described the ISIS’s ideology as "virus" that should be prevented, denied existence of ISIS-like in Mindanao. It also denied Ramos' reports that Filipino militants were fighting alongside with IS in Iraq and Syria. The MILF has recently signed a peace agreement with the Philippine government, ending decades of bloody war in the restive region of Mindanao.
http://www.mindanaoexaminer.net/2014/09/more-filipinos-pledge-allegiance-to-is.html
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