The Bondi Beach suspects allegedly trained in the Philippines, where there are

He suspicious father and son The terrorist attack on Jews gathered for a Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach, Australia, spent most of November in the Philippines, police said Tuesday. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for his part, stated that the attack was “motivated by ISIS ideology“.

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters that investigators were still looking into the reasons for the trip and where exactly the men went between November 1 and 28. The Philippine Immigration Bureau said Sajid Akram, 50, who died during the attack, and his 24-year-old son, widely identified by Australian media as Naveed Akram, had listed the southern city of Davao as their final destination on the trip.

Australian public broadcaster ABC reported that the men had received “military-style training” in the Asian nation, citing security sources.

“People have traveled and made contacts between these groups, but very, very rarely,” Tom Smith, academic director at the Royal Air Force College who studies security and terrorism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, told News themezone. “And this is often exaggerated.”

The history of the Philippines with the Islamist insurgency

Islamist separatists have operated in the southern Philippines for decades; It is “an insurgency that has been almost 100 years in the making,” according to Smith.

He said two long-standing militant groups in the region, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, known as MILF, and the Moro National Liberation Front, or MNLF, have been “kind of the grandfather, old rebel groups of the Islamist movement” in the region.

But, Smith said, “when you have two fairly beefy militant groups, people become dissatisfied. And that’s why there are also a lot of other fringe, much smaller militant groups” in the region, including one called Abu Sayyaf, which is affiliated with ISIS.

Smith said these groups are “much smaller in number, but probably more vicious in their attacks on civilians and government officials.”

“Analysts now describe Abu Sayyaf as fragmented remnants with residual ideological affinity to the Islamic State (ISIS), but little evidence of actual operational direction or sustained funding” of ISIS, Lucas Webber, a senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Soufan Center, told News themezone.

Based in the remote Sulu archipelago in the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf’s main business is kidnapping for ransom, Smith said.

“They wrapped themselves in the ISIS flag, or Al Qaeda in years past, because they want to inflate their sense of danger. Because, frankly, there’s an economic incentive to that. Because it means they’re going to get a higher ransom paid more efficiently, and these guys don’t play games,” he said. “In fact, they will behead people.”

That’s a view shared by the U.S. government, which designated Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organization in 1997, shortly after it emerged as an offshoot of the region’s largest Islamist groups.

According to the US State Department’s most recent assessment of 2023, it is “one of the most violent terrorist groups in the Philippines.”

“Some factions of the Abu Sayyaf Group have been reported to interact and coordinate with ISIS-P [ISIS-Philippines]including participating in attacks claimed by ISIS in the Sulu archipelago,” the US government assessment said, adding that he had “committed bombings, ambushes of security personnel, public beheadings, murdersextortion and kidnappings for ransom.

But both Smith and Webber told News themezone that the Abu Sayyaf and other regional factions had been hit hard in recent years.

“Years of military pressure[[with support from the United States]better local governance in Bangsamoro and amnesty/reintegration programs have dismantled many networks, led to mass surrenders and dramatically reduced the frequency and scale of attacks,” Webber said. “At the same time, small pockets of militants and ex-combatants with IS ideology remain in parts of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, and people can still be radicalized online or through personal ties. “The main risk today is not so much a large ‘IS province’ on Philippine soil, but rather the possibility that residual cells or sympathizers could attempt sporadic attacks or link up with transnational plots if local conditions deteriorate or security efforts are neglected.”

Terrorist training camps?

The News on Tuesday cited Philippine military and police officials as saying there have been no recent signs of foreign militants operating in the south of the country.

Smith said traveling for weapons training with Abu Sayyaf militants would be very difficult for foreigners in the Philippines, especially without knowledge of the local language.

“They would stick out like a sore thumb,” Smith said. “When I go there, you know, I’m there with military support. I have a PhD in the area, and even I stick out like a sore thumb.”

He said there are “a lot of armed people in Mindanao, in the Philippines, to go and practice, you know, shooting rifles and whatever. But it’s a long way to say that that amounts to a terrorist camp.”

Referring to the suspects in the Bondi Beach attack, Smith said it was “much more likely that they had rounded up some ex-rebels and gone somewhere in the jungle for a couple of weeks and taught them how to shoot and clean their rifles and things like that.”

The two largest militant groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front, which are not affiliated with ISIS, “have training camps. They are left alone in their territories. But it would be very unusual if the Bondi Beach attackers targeted them, because I can’t imagine the MILF or the MNLF would have tolerated that. So it’s really unusual,” Smith said.