The Anti-Terrorism Council on Thursday said it is still validating reports of Filipinos who have joined the Islamic State abroad, including two supposedly killed fighting with the jihadists in Syria.
“We’re validating such report that two Filipinos were fighting with the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as IS used to be known) in the conflict areas,” ATC executive director Oscar Valenzuela told a forum on Islamic radicalism at the EDSA Shangri-la in Mandaluyong City.
Valenzuela did not identify the two Filipinos.
He also admitted that there is no solid evidence, only suspicions, of Filipinos actually joining IS in Syria or Iraq, adding that the most likely recruits would be overseas Filipino workers in or near the conflict areas who he said “are vulnerable to recruitment by ISIS because money is so abundant.”
Earlier, the military said any Filipinos who might have joined ISIS fighters would most likely have crossed the borders from somewhere else and not necessarily have come from the Philippines.
Earlier, InterAksyon.com obtained a copy of a confidential memorandum from Felizardo Serapio Jr., executive director of the Philippine Center for Transnational Crime, asking Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr. to “consider the creation of a Technical Working Group that will create a database on monitoring and profiling foreign fighters, as a significant contribution to manage and inhibit further presence of Filipinos, as reported, in conflict-stricken areas.”
Serapio also heads the Law Enforcement Integrated Office, which is under Ochoa.
The memo cited a March 20 memorandum from the Department of Foreign Affairs to President Benigno Aquino III on the deaths of two Filipinos “allegedly fighting alongside the opposition group in Syria.”
It also referred to a report by the DFA to a March 20 meeting of the Regional Anti-Terrorism Council Convergence Group for the National Capital Region that “100 Filipinos who traveled to Iran had undergone military training and were deployed to Syria.”
The DFA has since said these reports are unverified.
However, recently, intellligence sources have maintained that jihadists, including foreigners from the Jemaah Islamiya network who have pledged allegiance to IS, are in Mindanao seeking recruits. The persistent reports prompted Muntinlupa Representative Rodolfo Biazon, a former Armed Forces chief, to suggest the creation of an inter-agency task force to address the threat.
http://www.interaksyon.com/article/96553/reports-of-pinoys-fighting-with-isis-still-being-validated---atc
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