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Southeast Asia
Philippine Military: 2 Women Linked to BIFF Killed by Bomb Blast
2021-04-30
[BenarNews] Violence involving government forces and pro-Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
forces of Evil erupted anew in the town of Datu Saudi Ampatuan in the southern Philippines, leaving two women dead and six people injured, including a senior holy warrior leader, the military said Thursday.

A bomb explosion in Maguindanao province on Wednesday morning killed the pair who the military said were linked to members of the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters
...a MILF splinter group aligned with the Islamic State...
(BIFF).

The military said the women — identified as Bahria Alon, 40, and Lagabai Mohalidin, 24, — were traveling with BIFF front man Abu Jihad when a bomb he was carrying prematurely went kaboom!. Jihad was able to escape.

"Alon and Mohalidin were killed. One of them was a wife of a BIFF commander. They were traveling with Jihad when the earth-shattering kaboom occurred," army Col. Pete Balisi, commander of the 1st Mechanized Brigade, told BenarNews, adding that a third civilian was injured.

Balisi said Jihad was able to escape.

"Based on the accounts of our witnesses, he was maimed," Balisi said.

The women were not considered as enemy combatants but as civilians linked to BIFF, he said.

The blast forced at least 549 families to evacuate their homes for safer grounds, local disaster officials reported.

Also on Wednesday, four soldiers were maimed in a separate explosion while they were pursuing the holy warriors, according to regional military front man Lt. Col. John Paul Baldomar.

The blasts come a little more than a month after 14 BIFF forces of Evil died in a series of festivities in Datu Saudi Ampatuan, the region where the forces of Evil have evaded troops for years by hiding in jungle and swamp areas.

The BIFF is a splinter group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which signed a peace deal with Manila and controls a Moslem autonomous area in the south.

In January, BIFF forces of Evil carried out two roadside kaboomings in the south that killed three and injured scores of people. In 2019, the group carried out a series of kabooms in the south targeting a market and a restaurant that injured more than two dozen people.

BIFF members pledged allegiance to the Islamic State whose supporters launched an attack on the southern city of Marawi in 2017 that left more than 1,200 holy warriors, security forces and civilians dead as a result of the five-month siege.

While BIFF did not send fighters to Marawi, it carried out diversionary attacks elsewhere.
Related:
Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters: 2021-04-15 Violence Mars Ramadan Start in Southern Philippines
Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters: 2021-03-30 Philippine Military: 4 Suspected IS-Linked Militants Killed in Clashes in Southern Province
Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters: 2021-03-24 Philippines: 14 Pro-IS Militants Killed in Southern Battles
Posted by:trailing wife

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