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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law Tuesday in the southern region of Mindanao, after deadly clashes between security forces and Islamic State group-linked militants in a major city there.
The announcement, made by his spokesman at a press conference in Moscow where Duterte was on an official visit, fulfills an often-repeated warning by the president that he would enforce military rule to quell security threats. "As of 10:00pm Manila time (1400 GMT) Duterte has declared martial law for the entire island of Mindanao," spokesman Ernesto Abella said in the nationally televised briefing. Abella said martial law would be in place for 60 days, in line with constitutional limits on the use of military rule.
Martial law is particularly sensitive in the Philippines because it was used by dictator Ferdinand Marcos to remain in power during his two-decade reign, which ended in 1986 with a "People Power" revolution.
Mindanao is made up of a large island of the same name, plus smaller islands, and the region of about 20 million people makes up roughly one third of the mainly Catholic country.
[...] The announcement came after security forces battled dozens of IS-linked gunmen in a built-up area of Marawi, a city of about 200,000 people in Mindanao, on Tuesday.
Source: Yahoo! News
In the Philippines, concerns are mounting over the proliferation of Islamic State affiliates on the southern islands of Mindanao. Jihadist groups in the region have been coalescing under the extremist group's flag since the head of Abu Sayyaf, Isnilon Hapilon, declared his allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014. Less than a decade earlier, Mindanao's various Islamic State affiliates were a jumble of local gangs engaged in criminal activity under the dubious banner of jihad.
By adopting the Islamic State's moniker and mimicking some of its tactics, Hapilon and other jihadist leaders in the Philippines have gained legitimacy, along with notoriety, as part of a well-known, transnational movement. But beyond that, the benefits of taking up the Islamic State banner have been marginal.
Source: Stratfor article published earlier this year.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday May 26 2017, @04:58PM (7 children)
Turkey, Russia, Philippines, US, China, UK ... who's next? We need our critical mass of authoritarians and nationalists, people, or this global war ain't gonna start itself!
A bit more effort, we're almost there!
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Friday May 26 2017, @05:45PM (5 children)
China is kinda unfair to include in that list, because before Jinping Xi, there was another authoritarian technocrat appointed by the Communist Party of China, whose policies were only really distinguishable by name and not form.
What's different between "Glorious Harmony" and "great revival of the Chinese nation"? Who knows.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 26 2017, @06:05PM (3 children)
I added China when I re-read before posting, because they are poking at their neighbors (and not-so-close ones) on territorial disputes.
But yes, their nationalism is not traditionally war-expansionist, as long as you don't live in Lhasa.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday May 26 2017, @06:16PM (2 children)
Or China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, Mongolia, etc. Keep in mind that China is at its current cultural extent and under the thumb of Communism presently because of a lot of past war-expansionism. And this is one of the many areas where past performance is not indicative of future results.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Friday May 26 2017, @06:28PM (1 child)
At least, when the Chinese build a border wall, they tend to stay on their side of it, instead of "settling" the other side anyway.
Their recent expansionism has been buying land in cheap fertile places, arguably more civilized than the old tradition of just walking a few million spare citizens into someone else's place (which they could quite easily).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 26 2017, @08:19PM
Their wall building phase tends to come after their war-expansionist phase. And there's not much history of serious wall builders colonizing the other side. Nazi Germany and the Siegfried line is the only example I can think of.
Most parties with any interest in offense operations over a long border used forts or military bases set back from the boundary as the primary defensive structures. For example, the Roman Empire guarded most of its land borders with series of forts. The Austrian Empire (prior to their defeat by Prussian in 1866) had a set of four fortress cities, the Quadrilatero [wikipedia.org] in northern Italy. Each military network provided defense against military powers of the day, but they also could serve as staging areas for raids or invasions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @11:24PM
Maybe it seems that way from the outside, but not on the inside. Xi has centralized a lot of power in himself under the guise of fighting corruption. Power that was previously distributed across the government. Real life isn't black and white, there are degrees of authoritarianism and China had been making progress under Hu. They had a long way to go, but under Xi progress has been reversed.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 26 2017, @06:30PM
Wars are profitable to the US military industrial complex, and indirectly to congress critters.
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