Philippines must disarm the child warriors of Sulu

 Opinion piece posted to Nikkei Asia (Aug 2, 2021): Philippines must disarm the child warriors of Sulu (By Criselda Yabes)

Recent arrests reveal dangers that should be addressed urgently

Armed extremists of Abu Sayyaf: violent extremism in the Philippines is a potential time bomb. © AP

Twelve-year-old Aisyah was trained to hate soldiers and kill as many of them as possible. In the jungle of Sulu island, she claimed to have fought in gunbattles on the side of the radical Abu Sayyaf Group in the name of Islamic jihadism and killed three soldiers.

The other side of Aisyah is the girl who loves listening to Filipino and Korean pop on TikTok, who thrills to riding pillion on a motorcycle, who enjoys a crush on a boy despite being married to a jihadi fighter four years older for whom she has no affection.

In June, the military caught her in a firefight intended to arrest her husband, who is close to Abu Sayyaf's leadership. He managed to escape. Aisyah, on the other hand, has proved something of a jackpot, revealing so much about the brainwashing and indoctrination of child warriors in the Philippines' troubled southern region.

Aisyah, it turns out, was one of the daughters of the Indonesian couple responsible for the suicide bombing attack on the Catholic cathedral of Sulu's capital in January 2019, which killed 20 people and wounded up to 100.

Roman Catholic cathedral in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province in the southern Philippines, after two bombs exploded, pictured in January 2019. © WESMINCOM Armed Forces of the Philippines/AP

Using children is nothing new since the Muslim rebellions of the 1970s that created so much strife in the south. But the recent trickle of Islamic State fighters into Sulu to take up the fight for a caliphate has set a dangerous precedent. Filipino rebels were not predisposed to suicide bombings.

Aisyah's 17-old sister Rezky was arrested in October last year along with two other women, with a vest, detonation cord, battery clip and switch button found in their possession. She is currently in detention outside of Sulu.

Able to load and fire an automatic rifle and fluent in the Tausug language of Sulu, Aisyah said he learned how to use a gun from her father Rian Zeke Rullie, and how to make a suicide vest from other rebels. "I will kill those soldiers; they're pigs," she told her interrogators. "Take me to the brigade," she demanded, referring to the army headquarters in Sulu. "I will kill plenty."

Classified government reports on the arrests of Aisyah and Rezky show how their father pushed their mother toward extremism and left his children in the hands of strangers. It was Rullie who had first landed in Sulu in 2018 from his hometown in Sulawesi, traveling first to Malaysia, then bribing border officials to cross by sea to the Abu Sayyaf nest in Sulu.

Aisyah's arrest has revealed a potential time bomb when it comes to violent extremism in the Philippines, and the country is not ready to deal with it, despite many decades of watching Islamic radicalism evolve in Mindanao. While Indonesia and Malaysia have begun de-radicalization programs, the Philippines failed to act.

Government agencies are not equipped with the social and psychological tools needed to handle children who have been radicalized, leaving elected Muslim leaders to sort out the problem. In places like Sulu, which the military considers the center of gravity, a culture of violence has already deeply permeated the island.

Aishya and Rezky had, according to their separate accounts, wanted to leave Sulu because of its unbearable conditions, where they lived in makeshift encampments in the mountains without electricity or running water. But they were always held back, brainwashed to believe that extremism was their life.

Their father had sold all the family's possession in Indonesia before bringing his wife and children to Turkey in 2015, en route to Syria to be with the Islamic State. Arrested and deported to Indonesia in 2018, their father left Sulawesi for Sulu later that year.

He made his wife follow him to Sulu just one week before the 2019 suicide attack on Sulu's Catholic cathedral. "And after my father talked to her outside our tent, she just kept crying and praying," Rezky said of her mother who was in her early 30s, and had so little time to process her own imminent death by strapping bombs to her body.

Rezky herself had managed to leave Sulu but was forced to return by her husband, a Malaysian jihadi whom she had met at a palm oil plantation in Sabah before their first trip Sulu. He also joined the Abu Sayyaf and was killed four months before her arrest last year. Aisyah's brother, two years older, now sits under the tutelage of Radullan Sahiron, the senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group in Sulu.

In the rebel camps, Aisyah says she came across Egyptian boys her age, presumably children or relations of an Egyptian father-and-son suicide team killed in an attempted mission late in 2019.

That attack on an army detachment failed when soldiers opened fire and was how Aisyah learned that she must not yell "Allahu akbar" if in a suicide attack as it gave the target time to react. Now, Aisyah says she could not do what her parents did. She misses them.

We do not know how many children there are like Aisyah on Sulu. But if there are as many as some fear, there will be no end in sight to the violence inculcated in the minds of those about to come of age.

[Criselda Yabes is a journalist based in the Philippines. She is author of "The Battle of Marawi," her 10th book, which was published last year.]

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Philippines-must-disarm-the-child-warriors-of-Sulu