Friday, December 12, 2014

Protection: State Duty (ISIS)


“The first duty of the Government is to afford protection to its citizens ”1.

The government is duty bound to protect its citizens, one of which is protection from threats as to the peace and order of the society as well as to give them security.

With regards to the recent events in the Philippines, the passing of the Bangsamoro Basic Law(BBL) in Congress and the Mamasapano incident, there have been talks that there is a greater threat in the Philippines than the rebels in Mindanao.

This is the presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria(ISIS), an extremist rebel group controlling territory in Iraq and Syria and also has operations in different parts of the world.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their commander, was named its Caliph

As a caliphate, it claims religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide and that "the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the khilāfah's (caliphate's) authority and arrival of its troops to their areas"2

Though the United Nations declared that there is no ISIS presence in the Philippines an ISIS study group has disagreed with this assessment.

“So yes, there is an IS presence in the country, its growing, and there are opportunities to prevent this from happening – but this requires the Aquino government to take off the gloves and unleash his forces to go after all Black Flag affiliates and not just ASG (Abu Sayyaf group),” The group stated.3

There are speculations that how the government will react to the Mamasapano insident as well as to the passing and implementing of the BBL will help in determining the influence the ISIS will have in the Philippines.

The establishing if whether there are ISIS members present in the Philippines now is not important the mere speculation that they were here and that they are providing support to the local militant groups in the Philippines is already enough to warrant that the government should be on guard.


1THE FIRST DUTY OF GOVERNMENT: PROTECTION, LIBERTY AND THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT
STEVEN J. HEYMAN*
2ISIS announces formation of Caliphate, rebrands as 'Islamic State'




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