“COWARDS!” the man muttered under his breath, though it would’ve been well within his rights to shout the word out loud. Cowards, indeed, they who so bravely wave the banner of terrorism. But that’s what terrorists do. They have changed the rules of warfare by not following any; they are as ruthless as they are uniformless; and they prey on innocents, including their own, such as the “heroes” who do not know whom they are killing and why.
The man who spat out the word was one of many survivors of the bombing of the cathedral in Jolo. Another survivor said he wished the same painful fate would befall the killers and their families. A few days later, a grenade was hurled into a mosque in a sitio in Zamboanga City and killed two sleeping men. In hindsight, the choice of Zamboanga rings alarm bells: Immediately after the Jolo massacre, Zamboangueños were already sounding the call for tighter security and protection. What danger did they sense remotely, even then?
Were the two Jolo bombers a couple, were they Filipinos or foreigners, were they suicide bombers? President Duterte sounded very confident when he said his sources were sure that the killers were suicide bombers, one of them a woman. This intel bit – A-1? – was followed by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana’s revelation that the woman, “according to sources,” was Yemeni.
From now on police, soldiers, and immigration agents on the lookout for terror suspects ought to be doubly vigilant. Terrorists resort to female suicide bombers because they cannot be frisked, their garments are loose enough to hide anything underneath, they remind agents of the law of their own wives, mothers, sisters.
In the world of information gathering, officials usually keep a tight lip on the theory that the less the enemy knows what you know, the safer you are. Back in the bad old days of the Marcos regime, when I asked a top official why no information was coming out after a particularly violent incident – this was martial law, after all – I was told, “We don’t want to terrorize the people.”
Back then, terrorize didn’t mean what it means in today’s post-Bin Laden era.
