THE Palace clarified on Saturday that the extremist Abu Sayyaf group will still have to be held accountable for their actions even if they were spurred by desperation spawned by historical injustices as claimed by President Rodrigo Duterte.
“He is not condoning what they have done. He is only putting their actions in the context that they were forced to desperation,” Abella said in an interview over state-run dzRB. “But they still need to be answerable for the actions.”
Abella made the clarification after Duterte said he was excluding the Abu Sayyaf from his anti-criminality campaign because they were only “driven to desperation over broken promises.”
“I’m not including the Abu Sayyaf dito sa criminality. You’ve never heard me say that they are criminals,” Duterte said, pertaining to the Moro rebellion that was spurred by real injustices experienced in the past.
Even before he assumed office, Duterte had already said that neutralizing the Islamic militant group, which recently beheaded two foreign hostages and kidnapped seven more, would be a top military priority.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the kidnappings of the extremist group—which is also blamed for the worst terror attacks in Philippine history—were already affecting the country economically.
“Our first priority is the Abu Sayyaf because that is the order of our new president: address the Abu Sayyaf immediately so we can neutralize them,” he told reporters. The Abu Sayyaf has defied two decades of government efforts to crush them and attacks such as its recent abduction of seven Indonesian seamen, prompting the country to bar its ships from carrying coal to the Philippines, have impacted the economy.
Lorenzana said that after conferring with military commanders, he would implement a plan “in a couple of days” to defeat the militant group.
The Abu Sayyaf is a loose network of a few hundred Islamic militants, formed in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, that has earned millions of dollars from kidnappings-for-ransom.
They are based in the heavily-forested, southern islands of Basilan and Sulu where their mastery of the terrain and assistance from local Muslim communities have helped them evade government pursuit.
Although its leaders have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, analysts say they are mainly focused on lucrative kidnappings.
The Abu Sayyaf earlier this year beheaded two Canadian hostages who were kidnapped from a yachting resort in September. Another hostage, a Norwegian seized in the same raid, is still being held along with other foreign and local captives.
Lorenzana said the military would continue its operations to recover the hostages and capture the gunmen.