Philippines’ biggest Muslim rebel group sounds IS alarm

DATU SALIBO, Philippines: The Philippines’ largest Muslim rebel group said on Wednesday it had lost 10 fighters in battles to stop a "growing force" of radical militants who support the Islamic State group.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front is seeking to prevent the militants from gaining a foothold in an area of Mindanao island that the MILF calls its own, senior rebel leader Mohagher Iqbal told AFP.

Iqbal said 50 or so militants had pledged allegiance to IS and had ties to gunmen waging a deadly three-month-old battle with government forces in the southern city of Marawi. "The radical elements are growing as a force," Iqbal told AFP by telephone.

An AFP video journalist who joined the MILF soldiers on Tuesday said the fighting was centred on vast marshy forests and farmlands near the town of Datu Salibo.

MILF men were filmed firing automatic weapons from a house, crossing streams and marshes with their machine guns, automatic rifles and rations raised above their heads, and inspecting the ruins of burnt houses.

Datu Salibo is about 100-km south of Marawi and about 800-km south of Manila. Iqbal put the MILF death toll from the fighting, which began early this month, at 10.

He said the militants had also sustained fatalities, although he could not give confirmed numbers. The 10,000-strong MILF has been leading a decades-long rebellion to establish an independent or autonomous homeland in Mindanao for the mainly Catholic Philippines’ Muslim minority. The conflict has claimed more than 100,000 lives.