The Bondi Beach suspects were reportedly trained in the Philippines, home to decades of Islamist insurgency.

I father and son suspect After the terrorist attack on Jewish people gathered for the Hanukkah event in Bondi Beach, Australia, who spent most of November in the Philippines, police said on Tuesday. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, on the other hand, that the attack had been “motivated by ISIS ideology.”

New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told the media that investigators are still looking into the reasons for the trip and where the men went between November 1 and 28. The Philippine Bureau of Immigration said Sajid Akram, 50, who was killed in the attack, and his 24-year-old son, widely identified by Australian media as Naveed Akram, as their final destination city.

Australia’s public broadcaster ABC reported that the men had received “military training” in the Asian country, citing security sources.

“People have traveled and communicated between these groups, but it’s rare,” Tom Smith, director of education at the Royal Air Force College who studies security and terrorism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, told CBS News. “And this is often overcrowded.”

The Philippines’ history of Islamist insurgency

Islamist separatists have operated in the southern Philippines for decades — “it’s a 100-year-old insurgency,” according to Smith.

He said two veteran groups in the region – the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, known as the MILF, and the Moro National Liberation Front, or MNLF – were “kind of the big, old rebel groups of the Islamist movement” in the region.

But, Smith said, “when you have two groups instead, kind of militant groups, people get angry. So there are a lot of other fringes, very small groups that are fighting” in the region, including one called Abu Sayyaf, which is affiliated with ISIS.

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

“Analysts now describe Abu Sayyaf as a fragmented remnant with residual ideologies with the Islamic State (ISIS), but little evidence of real operational direction or continued funding” from ISIS, Lucas Webber, a senior researcher at the New York-based think tank, told CBS News.

Based on the remote Philippine island of Sulu, Abu Sayyaf’s main business is kidnapping for ransom, Smith said.

“They wrapped themselves in the flag of ISIS, or the banner of al Qaeda years ago, because they want to increase their sense of danger. Because, obviously, there is an economic incentive in that. Because it means that they will get a high ransom that is effectively paid, and these guys are not playing,” he said. “They will really cut off people’s heads.”

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

According to the latest assessment of the US State Department as 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 collaborate and communicate with ISIS-P [ISIS-Philippines]including participating in attacks claimed by ISIS in the Sulu Archipelago,” the US government’s assessment said, adding that it had “carried out bombings, ambushes of security personnel, public beheading, executionrobbery, and kidnapping for ransom.”

But both Smith and Webber told CBS News that the Abu Sayyaf, as well as other parts of the region, have come under heavy attack in recent years.

“Years of military pressure [with U.S. support]better local governance in the Bangsamoro, and amnesty/rehabilitation programs have broken many networks, led to the surrender of many people, and greatly reduced the frequency and scale of attacks,” said Webber. “At the same time, small pockets of terrorists and ex-combatants with IS ideology live in parts of Mindanao and personal cangopela online, Sulu and radiocal. obligations. The biggest risk today is a small ‘IS province’ on Philippine soil, and it is possible that residual cells or sympathizers may attempt sporadic attacks or coordinate with international systems if local conditions deteriorate or security efforts are neglected.”

Terrorist training camps?

The Associated Press quoted military and police officials in the Philippines on Tuesday as saying that there has been no recent indication of foreign troops operating in the southern part of the country.

Smith said traveling to receive weapons training with Abu Sayyaf terrorists would be very difficult for foreigners in the Philippines, especially without local language skills.

“They’re going to stick out like a sore thumb,” Smith said. “When I go there, you know I’m there with the support of the military. I have a Ph.D in the area, even when I go outside like a sore thumb.”

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

Referring to the suspects in the Bondi Beach attack, Smith said “there is a good chance that they could have been former rebels who went somewhere in the bush for a few weeks and were shown how to shoot and clean their guns and things like that.”

The two main militant groups, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front – which are allied with ISIS – “have training camps. They are left alone in their own areas. But it would be very unusual if the Bondi Beach attackers were training with them, because I can’t imagine that the MILF or MNances were really unusual,” said Smith.