The New Face of the Islamic State in Southeast Asia

Not much was known about the Islamic State’s new leader for its so-called East Asia province, which encompasses Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and, according to a terrorism monitor, also Thailand. The Diplomat has recently learned the background and source of radicalization of the leader, best known by his nom de guerre Abu Zacharia, the chief of an IS-supporting terror outfit in the the southern Philippines known as the Maute group.

On March 2, 2022, the Armed Forces of the Philippines announced that Abu Zacharia, whose real name is Jer Mimbantas, is the new Southeast Asian emir of the Islamic State. He is also known as Faharudin Hadji Satar.

Who Is Abu Zacharia?

Abu Zacharia succeeded Owaida Marohombsar, known by his nickname Abu Dhar. Like Abu Zacharia, Abu Dhar was also the leader of the Maute group. He was killed in Lanao del Norte province in March 2019.

The top military official who made the recent announcement said Abu Zacharia was part of the Maute group that laid siege to Marawi city in Lanao del Sur province in May 2017 and fought government forces in a five-month battle, during which some 1,200 people, mostly militants, died and much of the city was destroyed.

Then-Southeast Asian emir of the Islamic State, Isnilon Hapilon, who was also a leader of the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group (ASG), and a Maute group leader, Omar Maute, were the siege leaders. They were killed during a historic ambush toward the end of the siege in October 2017.

An Indonesian government-affiliated terrorism researcher, Ulta Levenia Nababan, told The Diplomat that Abu Zacharia was a nephew of the late Alim Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, the vice chairman for military affairs of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a former insurgent group that is now friendly with the Philippine government.

“He's a member of the Mimbantas clan, which is quite famous in Butig in Lanao province, and also in Marawi,” said Ulta, a lead researcher of terrorism and political violence at think tanks Galatea and Semar Sentinel. “Jer Mimbantas himself was a nephew of Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, whose daughter was married to Sanusi,” a high-ranking leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), an Indonesian terror network linked to international terror group al-Qaida.

Ustaz Sanusi (Ustaz means Islamic teacher or scholar) was shot during pursuit operations by the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police in Marawi city in November 2012.

Sanusi, who also used the alias Ishak, had been charged with arson and murder. Philippine authorities were enforcing an arrest warrant against Sanusi and six other suspected JI terrorists inside the Mindanao State University compound. The arrest operation progressed into a pursuit during which Sanusi was shot. He was rushed to a hospital but died. Police recovered a hand grenade and an M16 rifle from him.

According to Ulta, who recently visited the southern Philippines to perform research on Indonesian terrorist fighters there, Sanusi was trained in the southern Philippines when JI had a camp called Muaskar Jabal Quba in Lanao Del Sur in 2002-2003 sponsored by al-Qaida.

“The Mimbantas clan has separated [from Abu Zacharia] since Sanusi brought JI’s ideas. But they got more separated after the Maute group introduced IS ideology,” Ulta said. “Sanusi later returned to the southern Philippines and met Zacharia; this was because his relative had married Sanusi.”

By the time Sanusi died in 2012, Ulta said, “he had already spread the radical ideology to youth in Marawi and Butig.”

“Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, who was a respected MILF sub-leader in Marawi, was not against Sanusi, but also did not support him,” Ulta said.

Ultimately, according to Ulta, “Sanusi was responsible for radicalizing Jer Mimbantas.”

Before the Maute group clashed with the Mimbantas family in Butig, Ulta said, the Mimbantas asked Abu Zacharia whether he would join forces with the Maute group and be a traitor or return to the Mimbantas family.

“There was also a gunfight between them. This story I got from my interview with a member of the Mimbantas family who is now part of BARMM,” said Ulta.

She was referring to the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, an autonomous region in the southern Philippines.

“The Mimbantas family is against Abu Zacharia’s terrorist idelogy,” stressed Ulta.

Leading the Islamic State in East Asia

The announcement by Philippine authorities that Abu Zacharia is the Southeast Asian emir of the Islamic State came just over a week before the international terror group annouced its new and third so-called worldwide caliph.

Abu Umar all-Mujahir, the newly appointed spokesman for the Islamic State, announced the appointment of Abu Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi as the new caliph on March 10. In doing so, he confirmed the death of the former caliph, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, who was said to have killed himself by detonating a suicide vest on February 3, 2022 during a U.S. commando operation in northern Syria, said U.S.-based Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, or TRAC, in its weekly analyst review issued on March 16 of this year.

TRAC said that since the announcement on March 16, over 25 photo reports and videos of Islamic State cells swearing bayah, or allegiance, to the new caliph have circulated on official Islamic State Channels on Telegram, RocketChat, Matrix and TamTam, among others.

“The swearing of bay’ah to a new caliph is a ritual or renewal for the Islamic State. It goes deeper than a mere photo-op. The propaganda produced is a chance for the organization to communicate the message that the Islamic State remains and holds within the commitment to expand,” TRAC said in the weekly review.

“Aside from the IS hotspots of Iraq, Syria, West Africa and Nigeria, bay’ahs have also come from India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Sinai.”

But there has been no word on Abu Zacharia’s regional Islamic State leadership anywhere apart from the Philippine military, raising questions about his position.

TRAC said there has not been any official pledges or congratulations to Abu Zacharia from any locations or countries.

“All we know about Abu Zacharia aka Abu Bakar, aka Abu Omar, aka Jer Mimbantas aka Farahufon [Faharudin] Hadji Satar, is what the [Philippine] military said,” Veryan Khan, TRAC’s editorial director, told The Diplomat.

“There has been no chatter about him on any Islamic State channels, official or unofficial – no chatter from IS supporters about him. Even the very usually chatty unofficial Knights of East Asia media label never commented on the new Emir of East Asia.”

“The last official set of photos to come from ISEA [Islamic State East Asia] pledging to the new caliph clearly has one person in front but he is masked. We don’t even know which group of fighters – Maute, BIFF, ASG, AKP – is being depicted in the last official photoset on 11 March 2022.”

BIFF is the acronym for the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters while AKP refers to the Ansarul Khilafah Philippines.

“Official ISEA photo reports were conspicuously absent from both the Diaries of Mujahideen During Ramadan and Eid Celebrations photosets. Every year ISEA submits them,” Khan said.

However, if the report of Abu Zacharia’s leadership is true, Khan said, this would put the Maute group back in the political powerhouse of the four different ISEA groups in the Philippines alone.

“I wonder if ASG would feel slighted not to have the nod from the new caliph? Which begs the question – will the other East Asia franchises in Indonesia and the fledgling new franchise in Thailand fall under the Maute’s authority?” Khan posed.

“I do find it really interesting that the last ISEA-claimed attack on 9 May 2022, occurred in Ragayan [a village in Marawi], where the Maute staged the Marawi [2017] siege and even though we know that all four ISEA [groups] are still operational, with at least three of them with large cadres, that they have been relatively quiet,” Khan said.

“Even the few election day attacks were relatively small. All of this leads me to believe they are preparing for something.”

The 2022 Philippine presidential election was held on May 9.

Successors and Connections

Hapilon, the slain leader of the pro-IS faction of the ASG and first ISEA emir, had been a high-profile figure both among militants and government authorities in the Philippines and overseas. Whether Abu Zacharia, allegedly the latest ISEA emir, will be as influential remains to be seen.

An April 2016 issue of the Islamic State’s weekly newsletter Al Naba said that Hapilon had been appointed as “emir of all Islamic State forces in the Philippines.”

On June 21, 2016 IS released a video entitled “The Solid Structure” which recognized Hapilon as the “mujahid authorized to lead the jihadists of the Islamic State in the Philippines, and designated him as the emir for Southeast Asia.” The video also called on Southeast Asian militants to travel to the Philippines and engage in what they called “jihad,” which a majority of Islamic scholars in the Islamc world denounced.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of State Rewards for Justice Program had a profile on him, stating Hapilon was born on March 18, 1966, in Lantawan, Basilan, Philippines. It described his personality as “likable by peers; proud and confident in his abilities” and his physique as “skinny; may have chin hair and slight mustache,” being “5 ft. 5 in (1.65 m) to 5 ft. 7 in (1.70 m) tall and weighing around 120 lb (54 kg).”

The United States had a bounty of $5 million on his head.

In May 2017, a joint operation of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police to serve an arrest warrant on Hapilon in Marawi instead sparked the five-month battle in the city after militants fought back the arrest attempt at a villa where Hapilon was believed to have been hiding.

But can Abu Zacharia inspire such devotion?

“The probability of that happening is low,” Munira Mustaffa, executive director at the Chasseur Group, a research and analytical consulting firm specializing in security challenges, told The Diplomat.

“Even if he could, he would have few Malaysian and Indonesian allies and collaborators. His support will come primarily from his own people, at most.”

“There are two reasons for this,” said Mustaffa. “The first is that IS's influence and ideology are diminishing. Second, the majority of the region's IS movement is powered by local insurgencies, which is inadequate for them to form a coalition of members from various parts of the region with different grievances – unless they can establish a powerful unifying objective because the previous global ambition has lost its luster.”

Much like many of his predecessors, Munira said, Abu Zacharia owed his connection to the late Alim Abdul Aziz Mimbantas, which may have somewhat contributed to his (still unconfirmed) elevation to leadership rank.

“However, he would still need to establish his leadership potential, which rests on his ability to develop long-term strategies to fund themselves while conducting effective militant operations, gaining and maintain strongholds, and steer his group through unrelenting anti-terrorism measures, all while attaining and sustaining popular support,” said Munira.

A Delay Replacing Abu Dhar

An ISEA emir after Hapilon’s death, Owaida Marohombsar, known also as Abu Dhar, was one of four militants killed in a gunbattle on March 14, 2019 that also left four soldiers dead near the southern Tubaran town in Lanao del Sur province. U.S. DNA tests later confirmed the death of Abu Dhar, who helped lead the 2017 siege of Marawi.

Government troops managed to kill most leaders of the siege, but Abu Dhar escaped Marawi with a large amount of looted cash and jewelry from the besieged city, leading authorities to fear that he could use the ill gotten wealth to rebuild militant groups and plan new attacks.

A regional official said at the time that Abu Dhar escaped from Marawi with at least 30 million pesos ($566,000) in stolen money. Troops hunted the extremist leader and his men down across Lanao, the Associated Press reported.

Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano, who announced Abu Dhar’s death in 2019, said: “This is another milestone in our campaign to finish and defeat ISIS and local terror groups in the country.”

The killing of Abu Dhar would make it harder for the Islamic State group to establish a firm presence in the country’s south, Ano added.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told reporters during the announcement of Abu Dhar’s death: “For now, his group is leaderless. We are monitoring who will replace Dhar.”

A notable Abu Sayyaf leader, Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan, was reported in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Defense to be the “acting emir” of the Islamic State for the region. However, in August 2020, the then-Philippine army chief claimed that Sawadjaan had likely died following clashes with government forces in July 2020.

From July 2020 to March of this year, there was no word of a new ISEA leader from Philippine authorities. Journalists, including this writer, suspected there had been a replacement chosen, but it was not publicly reported by the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The Philippine authorities seem to often downplay the matter of new militant leadership in an effort to protect the integrity of their operations up until a major development in pursuit of the new leader, as happened in the case of Abu Dhar, when his new leadership was announced by the Philippine government.

Similarly, the March 2022 announcement by the Armed Forces of the Philippines regarding Abu Zacharia as the latest ISEA leader came only after a major offensive on March 1 that overran his base in a hinterland village in Maguing town in Lanao del Sur. Three of Abu Zacharia’s men and one soldier were killed in the battle.

Abu Zacharia reportedly survived the military operation.

The military has been pursuing Abu Zacharia’s group since January, Army Brig. Gen. Jose Maria Cuerpo II said on March 2, adding that a recent intelligence report warned that his group might be preparing for a new round of hostilities.

Is Leadership Decapitation Enough?

Mustaffa said leadership decapitation happens all the time – specifically who is in charge is not the issue.

“What matters is the leadership’s ability to command, influence, and guide his followers, as well as the strength of the leadership’s myth building in shaping the narrative in formulating their messaging to attract support and membership,” she said.

“It is more practical for government stakeholders and authorities to focus on public goods, such as engaging directly with local communities to reduce tensions, whether racial or religious, to foster community relationships, and to assist the people in developing their autonomy,” Mustaffa said. “When it comes to countering harmful online narratives, communities would also benefit from being equipped with digital media literacy to improve their online resilience.”

Many militants are likely to be worn down by the pandemic, added Mustaffa, which has impeded their access to resources and increased their health risks, in addition to having to contend with ongoing military operations.

“Pro-IS militant groups in the southern Philippines have never really disappeared; they will continue to exist as long as their members adhere to the ideology… For them to return to their pre-COVID momentum might take them some time,” she said.

Abu Zacharia may not be well known to regional militant players like Hapilon was and a lot more about the new leader remains to be publicly known, with IS official and unofficial media houses still silent on him.

Only time will tell whether Abu Zacharia will manage to galvanize militants’ support fom neighboring nations and refresh the terror movement in Southeast Asia or mark the demise of the terror franchise in the region as hoped for by governments and a majority of Muslims in the region alike.