The Philippines’ armed forces eliminated nine Islamic terrorists, including two involved in last month’s bombing of a Catholic mass in southern city of Marawi.
On December 3, four worshipers were killed and over 50 were injured after a bomb went off at a Catholic service being held inside a university campus.
The terrorists killed by the military belonged to Daulah Islamiyah, a Philippines-based terrorist group affiliated to the Islamic State. The Philippines, despite being overwhelmingly Catholic, suffers from Islamic terrorism in its Muslim-dominated southern region. Islamic terror groups such as the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) have been waging jihad warfare against country’s peaceful Christian population.
Marawi city, where the last month’s bombing took place, witnessed a deadly siege in 2017 by Islamic terrorists, which took around 1,000 innocent lives. “The Marawi siege was carried out by the Islamic State-linked Maute group, a pro-Islamic State faction of the Abu Sayyaf group and other smaller Islamic State-linked groups,” the Japanese newspaper Nikkei noted December 5.
“The fighting killed some 1,000 people and was Islamic State’s most serious push to gain a foothold in Southeast Asia, unsettling governments across the region.”