Duterte vows to arm gov’t troops with modern weapons vs IS, NPA

President Duterte meets with soldiers in Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija province. —JOAN BONDOC

FORT MAGSAYSAY, NUEVA ECIJA—President Duterte on Wednesday night said he was arming soldiers and policemen with state-of-the-art weapons as he warned them about the resurgence of terrorism from the Islamic State (IS) and the New People’s Army (NPA).

Addressing soldiers of the Army’s Special Operations Command here, the President said the IS was the newer and bigger threat for a military fighting the communist insurgency for more than 50 years.

At present being driven out of the borders of Syria and Iraq, the IS “will go back to [southern Philippines] and we expect, and you should expect, that there would be another explosion one of these days again,” he said in Filipino.

“If terrorists conduct simultaneous attacks in three to four cities, that would be chaotic and would be hard to control,” he said when he visited this military camp to award soldiers who fought to retake Marawi City from the IS-inspired terrorists belonging to the Maute and Abu Sayyaf groups.

“In the meantime, I am buying all available equipment to fight [the enemy] … We can buy multiple rockets. But we will take loans to buy them,” he said, adding that acquiring the weapons for free from countries like China and Russia would be “a dent on our sovereignty.”

He said the government could take on soft loans payable in 25 years to build what he described as “next generation weapons, and not secondhand firearms and equipment.”

Mr. Duterte also said the military must design a better strategy for urban warfare, citing the difficulties encountered by the military in the campaign to retake Marawi.

He said military attaches and world leaders who attended the 31st Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Manila had congratulated the country’s military for defeating the terrorists in record time, compared to the battle to drive away IS in Syria and Iraq.

“What is important is you have the tools in your hands to fight. We now have IS, we also have the NPA to deal with,” he said.

“But you will have everything you need to win the war,” he added. —ARMAND GALANG