Is the Islamic State’s next frontier in the Pacific and Asia?

The commander of American military forces across Asia, Adm. Harry Harris, said the jihadist group — commonly called ISIS — is seeking new territory as it gets squeezed out of Iraq and Syria.

“It’s clear to me that [ISIS] is also “rebalancing” to the Indo-Asia-Pacific,” said Harris, speaking during a meeting of the San Diego Military Advisory Council on Wednesday in Point Loma.

Using a cancer analogy, the four-star leader of U.S. Pacific Command added: “Through multinational cooperation, we can eradicate this [ISIS] disease before it metastasizes.”


But the U.S. alliance with the Philippines hit choppy waters recently after comments by President Rodrigo Duterte — something that Harris also addressed Wednesday with lightly veiled criticism of Duterte’s statements.

“We have been allied with the Philippines for a long time. We have shed our blood with them. … We fought side by side during World War II. I consider our alliance with the Philippines to be iron-clad,” Harris said. He also mentioned U.S. aid to the Philippines, budgeted at $120 million this year, and the dispatch of American troops to help after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

“So when the leader said, ‘Only China supports us,’ I don’t know what he means,” Harris said, answering a reporter’s question toward the end of his presentation.

Duterte started making headlines last week when, speaking in Tagalog, he called President Barack Obama a son of a bitch.


Since then the Philippines president has said his government would shop for weapons in China and Russia and would halt joint U.S.-Philippines patrols in the South China Sea to avoid appearing hostile to China.

He also called for the departure of U.S. special-operations troops from the southern Philippines, saying their presence could complicate the fight against the ISIS-linked terrorist group Abu Sayyaf.

One analyst said it appears that nationalism and a desire for “outsider” status are driving the Filipino president’s current tone.

“I don’t really think this is as much about the U.S. as it is about domestic politics — and just his personality. We are a very useful whipping boy,” said Thomas Sanderson, director of the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “I think this is largely about someone who is a rebel … he’s an outsider and he’s broken through into an area that outsiders typically didn’t get to.”


Sanderson said the Philippines would do an about-face if Islamic terrorism becomes a more widespread problem for Filipinos.

“[Duterte] comes right back to us, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Because the center of gravity for counter-terrorism knowledge and skill is the United States.”

Harris outlined the signposts of the ISIS advance on new turf in the Pacific Command theater, an area that’s home to 700 million Muslims. That means more Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region than in the Middle East.

“Population numbers alone have forced [Pacific Command] to think ahead about what’s next in the fight against [ISIS],” Harris said. “The vast majority of these people are peaceful citizens who seek to live lives free from the scourge of terrorism, but we know that a small band of fanatics can produce deadly results.”


He pointed to ISIS-inspired terrorism in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines so far in 2016. Those events include the July 2 attack on a Bangladeshi restaurant by ISIS-aligned militants. In May and June, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines released video showing the beheadings of two Canadians after their families didn’t pay ransoms.

Hundreds of jihadists have traveled from Asia to the main ISIS battlegrounds of Iraq and Syria to join in the group’s violent vision of creating an Islamic caliphate, according to published accounts.

The tally is about 700 from Indonesia, 100 from Malaysia, 100 from the Philippines, 200 from the Maldives, 300 from China and 120 from Australia, according to a December report by The Soufan Group. These recruits make up a small portion of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters ISIS can claim or has been credited with over time.

But as they tire of warfare, the danger is that they may return home and try to continue the fight — and recruit others.


Sanderson said Indonesia has the highest vulnerability to ISIS despite its strong security forces, because of the number of ISIS fighters already hailing from there and because of Indonesia being a string of islands with lots of places to hide.

All of this comes as the United States is finishing its own “rebalance,” with the Navy shifting 60 percent of its fleet to the Pacific by 2020. That move, announced late in Barack Obama’s first term, was seen as a hedge against North Korean saber-rattling and the growing economic and military might of China.

Academics differ on how big the ISIS threat is becoming in the Pacific and Asia.

Eli Berman, a UC San Diego economics professor, said he thinks “rebalancing” is too strong a term for the jihadist group’s foothold in Asia. ISIS isn’t on the verge of controlling territory anywhere in the Pacific Rim, said Berman, who is a research director at the university’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.


Asia expert Denny Roy at the East-West Center in Honolulu agrees with Harris that the basic ideas represented by ISIS won’t die if the Islamic State is geographically erased.

“The purveyors of those ideas are already trying to transplant them into other regions and are finding some interest,” Roy said.

But several observers pointed out that Asia has major differences that may hinder ISIS if it tries to expand there.

Governments there are generally more intact than in the Middle East.


“What’s missing is the ultra-weak states in which locals are ready and chomping at the bit to sign up for something to do,” said Sanderson at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are far fewer people who would want to sign up for a battle inside of Indonesia, as opposed to those who would want to sign up to battle inside Libya, Tunisia, Yemen or Syria — where the majority of young men would say, ‘Give me a gun and let’s go.’ They have nothing to lose.”

Roy sees South Asia, which includes Bangladesh, as fertile ground for extremism.

“Southeast Asia is less so, because the sense of grievance and the (routine practice) of mass political violence are less strong than in the Middle East or South Asia,” he said.

jen.steele@sduniontribune.com


Twitter: @jensteeley