Moro Islamic Liberation Front

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on November 13th, 2011
Photo by Reuters

The colourful and vociferous Philippine media called it everything from a “bloodbath” to an “ambush”.  Accusations were traded and fingers were pointed in all directions immediately after. But that was nearly a month ago. Now, the story has been relegated to the back pages of the broadsheets, if on the pages at all. 

Less passionately, it is now simply referred to as “the Al Barka incident”, after the locale in which it took place on the small southern island of Basilan in Mindanao. 

The “incident” nearly ruined an already tenuous truce between Philippine government troops and Muslim insurgents – who, by the way, no longer want to be called that. But they aren’t “rebels” either. Nor is it right, they say, to call them “separatists”. For the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), this is a battle to reclaim Muslim independence.  

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on February 16th, 2011

They cut through the jungle to the small clearing like a swarm of bees with their leader at their core. The only sound was the swish of their feet slicing through the unkempt grass. At least two hundred of them – heavily armed. Most wearing black shirts that proclaimed "BIFF of the MILF" – and in that one instance clarifying the primary question on people’s minds: this renegade "splinter group" still considered itself a part of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

According to their leader Ameril Umbrakato – one of the Philippines' most wanted men – he put together the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (or B.I.F.F.) because he was left with little choice. 

"When they had a ceasefire, the government and the MILF – they didn’t include me – they put me aside, rejected me," Umbrakato told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.  

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on February 11th, 2011
Photo by EPA

"They say so much… and accomplish nothing ..."

The almost-whispered words of the weary 24-year-old warrior reverberated in the sweltering heat of the marshland morning. Its' hollow echo like ghosts of all the fallen in this scarred land ... striking in their silence.

He looked away, but his words hung in the air like flies around a corpse.

As a Muslim, Norodin feels he was born into this war in the southern Philippines. His father was a separatist fighter before him, so he too joined the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF. 

He knew little else. 

Many others share his story.

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