[Business Mirror] Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte will not likely meet his forecast of ending terrorism in Mindanao by this month, given the results of the operations against the Abu Sayyaf, which he had entrusted to Armed Forces Chief of Staff Ricardo Visaya with an accompanying explicit order of finishing the insurgent group "to the last man."Visaya is retiring on December 8 but, not only the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu and Basilan, which is being undertaken by 18 battalions of soldiers and six companies of militiamen, is still to reach its full operational tempo.
The problem has even widened with a new front in the anti-terror campaign, due to the Lanao del Sur-based Maute Group. The previously unheralded Maute Group has turned into a full-blown Moro jihadi organization that is in the league of the Abu Sayyaf in less than five months - even bolder, in fact.
The Maute group, which the military initially considered to be aligned with Jemaah Islamiyah, but confined in Lanao del Sur, has steadily built its reputation as a terrorist group that the Philippine government will have to contend in the years to come.
The group has built its memberships from the rosters of young radicalized fighters from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who shared the same stronghold in Lanao del Sur.
While the Abu Sayyaf has mostly carried out its bombings in Mindanao, the Maute Group ushered its first publicly known bombing right in Duterte's hometown of Davao City in September, killing 14 people and wounding at least 70 others.
On Monday a bomb was recovered near the U.S. Embassy in Manila, which was attributed to the Maute Group, because of the similarity of the bomb with the one used in Davao City.
The Maute was among the three groups, after the Abu Sayyaf and the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, that have pledged their allegiance to Daesh.