BIFF founder Kato weak, but extremist influence on members remains strong

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines - The ailing founder of the brigand Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters is no longer running the show, but his extremist views and hate for the “kuffar” have been deeply supplanted among his followers and sympathetic jihadist groups.

The Arabic term kuffar (kaf’r) means unbeliever or infidel and is widely used now by most Moro skeptics and cynics as common label for non-Muslims.

The BIFF’s founder, Imam Ameril Ombra Kato, who studied Islamic theology in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s as a scholar of then President Ferdinand Marcos, has been physically incapacitated for more than two years now following a hypertensive stroke that left half of his body paralyzed.

“He is now so weak, wears an adult diaper and could hardly speak well,” a close relative, who is residing near the headquarters of an Army’s 1st Mechanized Brigade in Barangay Salbu in Datu Saudi town, said in Maguindanaon dialect.

Kato started as chief of the 105th Base Command of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, but was booted out in early 2010 for insubordination and irreconcilable differences with the MILF’s central committee.

Local officials in Maguindanao’s adjoining Mamasapano, Datu Piang, Datu Saudi, Datu Unsay and Sharif Aguak towns said Kato’s most trusted lieutenants, Bongos, Karialan and Tambako, now acts independently, their groups separated by factional divides.

The three BIFF commanders have openly pledged support to the extremists Independent State of Iraq and Syria, now sowing havoc in the so-called Levant region of the Middle East, during a clandestine gathering in July 2014 in Maguindanao.

A video footage of the meeting, where BIFF gunmen were seen hoisting an ISIS banner, was uploaded on a Moro extremist Facebook account a week later.

Karialan and Tambako, also both clerics, are now subject of a massive hunt by combined Marine and Army contingents in six Maguindanao towns, an operation that started last February 28.

Kato and the pioneer members of the BIFF’s central leadership core have a common denominator --- that of being bitter enemies of the Ampatuan clan, whose private militias fought them from 2000 to 2009 in a bid to flush them out of its “political principality,” then comprised of ten towns, where it once ruled with absolute intolerance for political opposition.

Kato was said to have lost control of his extremist group more than a year ago due to the continuing deterioration of his health.

Tambako, whose real name is Mohammad Ali Tambako, had even assumed command of the BIFF for eight months, when Kato got so weak, after his family confined him to a hut at a rebel enclave at the tri-boundary of Sharif Aguak, South Upi and Guindulungan towns in the second district of Maguindanao,

“The BIFF has less than 500 members and only about 300 of them are armed, but they are jihadists, whose extreme spiritual views were made so extreme by Kato’s kuthab (sermon) during Friday worship rites when he was still healthy,” 43-year-old peasant Udtog Kumbel said in Filipino, in heavy Maguindanaon accent.

Relatives of Kato said his family have also been experiencing difficulty in linking up with his Maranaw physician who is based in Cotabato City.

“His subordinate-commanders started to get fragmented in late 2013,” said a high-ranking official of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, who was born and raised in what is now fledgling Datu Saudi town, whose barangays were carved from the old town of Datu Piang in west of Maguindanao.

A barangay chairman, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, said Kato’s radicalism and extreme interpretation of teachings in the Qur’an became unquestionably apparent when his followers pulled off attacks and blocked portions of a national highway in Datu Saudi and Datu Unsay towns during the 2012 and 2013 Ramadhan fasting seasons.

“They were made to believe that the gate to paradise is wide open to martyrs during the Ramadhan,” said a principal of a public school in Guindulungan town.

Moderate Muslims argued, however, that Ramadhan is a “holy month” in Islam, where people, as a religious obligation, ought to fast from dawn to dusk for one lunar cycle, about 28 to 29 days, as reparation for wrongdoings and to achieve spiritual perfection in the context of harmony with neighbors means oneness with Allah.

“Muslims should avoid engaging in all kinds of conflicts during the Ramadhan,” A yakan preacher, Imam Sarikin, explained.

BIFF gunmen brutally killed two off-duty soldiers last year while emerging from the Catholic chapel at the town proper of Datu Piang, a total turn-around from Islamic teachings on respect for worships sites regardless of whether these are owned by Muslims or non-Muslims.

Kato’s followers have also been enforcing a ruthless Taliban-style justice system in areas where they have enclaves.

The renegade Tambako, whose group beheaded Ilonggo farmers, abducted teachers and elementary pupils and burned down houses during a raid in Midsayap in January 2014, now has a group of his own, the Justice Islamic Movement, but is most known to mayors in Maguindanao as the Saifullah, which some had interpreted as "sword of God."

Karialan, Bongos and Tambako now lead different groups that are autonomously operating in peasant enclaves along the vast Liguasan Delta at the tri-boundary of Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat and North Cotabato.

“Each one of them wants to expand their territories where they can collect revolutionary taxes,” said a government health worker based in the second district of Maguindanao.