The Philippines on the Front Line

  • Canadian companies and NGOs working in the Philippines, particularly in Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, should consider their personnel and assets to be at risk from terrorist violence.
  • The Philippines has had a longstanding conflict with Jihadist militancy, beginning with Islamic separatist movements on the southern islands of Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago in the 1970s.
  • Al-Qaeda terrorists who conceived the 9/11 attacks were active in the Philippines during the 1990s.
  • In the 2000s, the Abu Sayyaf Group swore allegiance to ISIS, becoming part of the so called “IS East Asia Province.”
  • Abu Sayyaf and its offshoots have been involved in Jihadist militancy and insurgency up until the present day and has murdered Canadians.

Massacre on Bondi Beach

On December 14, two gunmen opened fire on a large gathering of Jews celebrating the first full day of the Jewish festival of Chanukah at Sydney, Australia’s iconic Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were murdered, almost all of them Jewish, and forty-two victims were hospitalized with gunshot wounds. One of the gunmen, Indian national and Australian resident Sajid Akram, was shot dead by a police officer at the scene. The other, Sajid’s son Naveed, a natural-born Australian, was wounded but survived and has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder. Both attackers were Muslim. The attack itself, which features all the hallmarks of Jihadist violence, is widely seen as the culmination of rising levels of overt antisemitism in Australia. It is also the largest mass killing of Jews since the events of October 7, 2023.

The Philippine Connection

Shortly after the massacre, Australian counterterrorism officials revealed that Akram father and son had travelled to the Philippines in early November 2025, where they spent almost a month in Davao City, on the southern island of Mindanao. Initial speculation, again on the part of Australian counterterrorism officials, was that the pair had gone to Mindanao to undergo “military-style” training, presumably under the tutelage of Islamist militants in the region. 

This hypothesis remains controversial. While senior Philippine security officials have confirmed that the two travelled to the Philippines, they have added that “no meaningful or structured training” could have taken place during the period in question. Staff at the Davao City hotel where the Akrams stayed have said that the two rarely left their room during their time there, aside from visits to restaurants and a nearby mosque. Philippine police intimated that they may have detected a signal from one of the Akrams’ phones in a part of Mindanao adjacent to suspected Islamist militant strongholds. That said, Mindanao is hard country – thickly forested, with poor roads and infrastructure outside of major cities. It is not entirely clear how they would have got there and back again in a day’s travel. Nor is it clear why they would have travelled openly, using their own names, passports and credit cards, from Sydney to Davao, via Manila, if they had indeed been meeting Islamist militants.

Why The Philippines?

The Islamic presence in the Philippines predates European contact by a couple of centuries. Arab and Muslim Malay seafarers and traders visited and established settlements in the southern part of the archipelago in the 14th century. Today, anywhere from 6% to 12% of the population of the predominantly Roman Catholic country is Muslim, with heavy concentrations in Mindanao and other southern regions. 

Mindanao, and other parts of the southern Philippines, have had a longstanding problem with Islamist insurgency and militancy, going back to the 1970s and the emergence of Muslim separatist groups like the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Both groups have, to one degree or another, “gone straight” and are components of the so-called Framework Agreement on Bangsamoro with the Philippine government, which lays the foundation for a Muslim autonomous region (Bangsamoro means “Muslim Nation” in Tagalog) on parts of Mindanao, Palawan, and the Sulu Archipelago.

Links to Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda (AQ) established a presence in the Philippines well before 9/11. In the 1990s, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Youssef, both of whom played critical roles in formulating the 9/11 plot, used Manila as their base of operations while developing the so-called “Bojinka Plot,” which would have used IEDs to bring down 11 passenger airliners over the Pacific during a single 24 hour period. Had it not been disrupted by Philippine authorities, Bojinka would have resulted in an estimated 4000 casualties, indeterminate suspension of international air travel and, most importantly, global panic that would probably far exceed the aftermath of 9/11.

ISIS and Friends

Post 9/11, the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) rose to prominence as one of the Philippines’ preeminent Jihadist entities. Originally associated with AQ, ASG eventually swore allegiance to IS, becoming part of the IS “East Asia Province,” comprising the southern Philippines, parts of Indonesia, and southern Thailand, all of which have large Islamic minorities. A key ASG tactic was kidnapping foreigners for ransom. In 2015, AS terrorists kidnapped two Canadians from a marina and resort near Davao city, beheading them a few months later when a $6 million ransom demand was not forthcoming. In 2017, AS fought a five-month battle with Philippine security forces for control of the Muslim majority city of Marawi on Mindanao. The confrontation ended with close to 3,000 total casualties and near total destruction of a city of a quarter million people.

Why This Matters…For the Philippines

The Philippine government has had some success in eliminating and / or demobilizing Jihadist militants over the past decade. It has also deployed a variety of reintegration and rehabilitation programming, as well as initiatives (including the Bangsamoro Agreement, as above) to address social, political, and cultural issues that serve as “push factors” for radicalization and militancy. Nevertheless, terrorism – Jihadist terrorism in particular – remains a serious problem in the Philippines and the country remains in the top 20 countries most affected by terrorism. The resurgence of ISIS ideology and violence, especially outside of the Middle East, suggests that the Philippines (to say nothing of other terrorism-afflicted states) may have a long way to go before it roots out its problem with Jihadist militancy and insurgency.  

One of the problems faced by the Philippines is that it features many of the elements of a weak state – including corruption, low growth, lack of transparency, and lack of trust in government institutions – particularly in its southern hinterlands. This weakness, along with a large, and sometimes restive, Muslim population, is a regional feature that makes it particularly attractive to Jihadist groups, including those allied with ISIS. 

Full-scale terrorist operations often unfold in failing, or failed, states, like Somalia, or Syria. Weak states, somewhat counterintuitively, are “strong enough” to offer Jihadist groups the stability and the basic structures that they need to survive, to plan, and to run recruitment, training, and psychological and ideological operations. At the same time, weak states are “weak enough” to offer exploitable gaps in government authority, particularly in isolated regions, along with physical access to terrorist actors and zones of operation. If the Akrams did make contact with Jihadists during their time in Mindanao, whether for advice, assistance or even some sort of mandate for their Bondi attack, it was this dynamic that allowed them to do so.

Why This Matters…For Us

Canadian foreign direct investment in the Philippines now stands at just under a billion dollars and the two countries are currently engaged in free trade talks. Analytical projections emerging from these talks identify infrastructure and logistics, agri-tech, and energy as particularly lucrative potential sectors for Canadian FDI. This fall, meanwhile, the government of Canada pledged to invest $76.45 million to strengthen climate resilience and health outcomes, and to foster inclusive economic growth in the Philippines. 

Current Global Affairs Canada assessment of the Philippines, divides the country into two distinct levels of threat: the north, where travelers are urged to exercise a high degree of caution, and Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago, which travelers are advised to stay out of altogether. 

The Philippines is a “front-line state,” both on account of its internal conflict with Jihadist militancy and its ongoing confrontation of Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. So, it is in the interests of Canada and Canada’s allies to look for ways to help the Philippines build its economy and its infrastructure, and to respond effectively to its internal security threats. But this also means that Canadian companies and NGOs, along with their employees, may find themselves in direct confrontation with militant and insurgent groups with a proven record of hostility to Western interests. So, any operations in the Philippines, even those rooted in humanitarian or development aid and assistance, must be backstopped with rigorous threat assessment and threat management.