Philippines: Villagers and Their Cows Flee After ISIS Takes Over Market

As longtime readers know, I lived in the Philippines for some years.

What a kooky, fun place it is.

Crazy stuff like this happens all the time.

RT:

Residents were evacuated from a Philippines town after around 200 Islamist fighters captured a local market, reportedly in order to score a meal. Gunshots were heard as the military tried to flush the militants from the area.

Members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) seized the public market of Datu Paglas, located on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, on Saturday morning, prompting the deployment of military and police units to the area.

The group opposes a peace agreement between Muslim rebels, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and the central government. Some members of BIFF have also reportedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

Hundreds of residents fled the town, but some civilians were prevented from leaving by the militants, who used a truck to block a highway leading to the market, according to local media.

Photographs and videos posted on Twitter show villagers making a hasty exit using motorbikes, vans, and animal-drawn carts.

I haven’t been in the country since Rody Duterte took over. I was really excited when he won, because he was promising to murder drug addicts and Moslems, and break the country away from American imperial influence.

I had lived in the city of which he was mayor, and knew that he was really good at killing bad guys. They had a system in Davao where they would arrest people then free them from jail in the middle of the night and someone would drive by on a motorcycle and shoot them.

He did kill a lot of drug addicts during his first year as president, and he seemed to be dealing with the Moslem issue. But it seems like American imperial influence has gotten the better of him.

He went nuts with the coronavirus stuff for reasons that were never really clear, and he’s supporting the US war with China, even though he’d done a good job opposing it during his first years in office.

On some level, he’s become like a Donald Trump figure – he’s charismatic and says a lot of funny stuff, but he’s getting led in weird directions by unseen forces.

As everyone knows at this point, ISIS is a US branding – as much so as McDonald’s or Coca-Cola.

The US government is running terrorist training camps in the Philippines, presumably as part of some wacky plan to unleash them on Indonesia or possibly Malaysia in the case of a war with China. That’s what all of this Moslem stuff is about. Duterte’s instincts would be to just send in death squads to the villages with terrorists and tell the soldiers not to kill innocents on purpose, but if they did it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

You can debate the morality of that, but it would get the job done, and in the long run, it would save lives.

But he can’t do that, because the US military is protecting these terrorist camps. The result is that he ends up looking weak when these terrorists rush the village and conquer the market.