The Philippine Study – Vol 1.

“We are asking for an independent investigation because it was too quick, too soon to say it’s a
closed case,” said Jefferson Nadua, a parish priest. “This is a serious matter that needs to be
looked at more deeply because the threat is not just local. It’s maybe coming from outside,
from ISIS.” Mr. Indama, the former fighter who says he left Abu Sayyaf last year because he
rejected the Islamic State’s ideology, claimed he saw foreign operatives in the Basilan jungle
camps.The idea that no overseas fighters have stolen onto Basilan was shattered last July when
it was the site of the first suicide bombing in the Philippines.The Islamic State claimed that the
attack, which killed 11 people, had been the work of a Moroccan recruit. The Philippine
authorities initially denied the attack had been by a suicide bomber, much less a foreigner.
Weeks later, they admitted it had been carried out by a German-Moroccan suicide bomber.Last
year, a Spaniard was arrested in Basilan with bomb-making materials. An Egyptian carrying
$19,000 in cash was also stopped on his way to Basilan, according to Mujiv Hataman, the
governor of the autonomous Muslim region of the Philippines. November through February
constitutes the most agreeable season; the air is cool and invigorating at night, and the days
are pleasant and sunny. During the hot part of the dry season in most places—especially in the
cities of Cebu, Davao, and Manila—the temperature sometimes rises as high as 100 °F (38 °C).
Overall temperatures decline with elevation, however, and cities and towns located at higher
elevations—such as Baguio in northern Luzon, Majayjay and Lucban south of Manila, and
Malaybalay in central Mindanao—experience a pleasant climate throughout the year; at times
the temperature in those places dips close to 40 °F (4 °C). “ISIS has a lot of power,” said
Motondan Indama, a former child fighter on the island of Basilan and cousin of Furuji Indama, a
militant leader who has pledged fealty to the group. “I don’t know why my cousin joined, but it’s
happening all over.” “They convinced me that if you die in battle, you will be rewarded in the
hereafter,” he said. “They said it was the right path.” “ISIS has money coming into the
Philippines, and they are recruiting fighters,” said Rommel Banlaoi, chairman of the Philippine
Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research. “ISIS is the most complicated, evolving
problem for the Philippines today, and we should not pretend that it doesn’t exist because we
don’t want it to exist.” The United States and the Philippines have a strong trade and investment
relationship, with over $27 billion in goods and services traded . The United States is one of the
largest foreign investors in the Philippines, and is the Philippines’ third-largest trading partner.
Contemporary Filipinos continue to grapple with a society that is replete with paradoxes,
perhaps the most obvious being the presence of extreme wealth alongside tremendous
poverty. Rich in resources, the Philippines has the potential to build a strong industrial
economy, but the country remains largely agricultural. Especially toward the end of the 20th
century, rapid industrial expansion was spurred by a high degree of domestic and foreign
investment. That growth, however, simultaneously contributed to severe degradation of the
environment. The Philippines also emerged as a regional leader in education during the late
20th century, with a well-established public school and university system, and by the early 21st
century the country had one of the highest literacy rates in Asia. Philippines, island country of
Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. It is an archipelago consisting of more than 7,000
islands and islets lying about 500 miles (800 km) off the coast of Vietnam. Manila is the capital,
but nearby Quezon City is the country’s most-populous city. Both are part of the National
Capital Region (Metro Manila), located on Luzon, the largest island. The second largest island of
the Philippines is Mindanao, in the southeast. ADMIXTURE v1.3 and CLUMPP were used to
analyze population structure, which was subsequently visualized using Pong v1.4. Outgroup f3
statistics and formal tests of admixture were performed using qp3Pop and qpDstat of the
AdmixTools v5.0 package . We used qpF4Ratio and qpAdmin of the AdmixTools v5.0 package
for estimating admixture proportions in populations, and qpGraph for fitting populations in an
admixture graph with baseline framework based on earlier publications . For estimating dates
of admixture, we utilized a weighted linkage disequilibrium (LD) statistic-based method,
MALDER , which also allows detection of multiple admixture events. To infer local ancestries
and subsequent masking in admixed populations, we utilized RFMix , which employs a
conditional random field parameterized by random forests trained on reference panels of least
admixed populations. SignificanceA key link to understand human history in Island Southeast
Asia is the Philippine archipelago and its poorly investigated genetic diversity. We analyzed the
most comprehensive set of population-genomic data for the Philippines: 1,028 individuals
covering 115 indigenous communities. We demonstrate that the Philippines were populated by
at least five waves of human migration. The Cordillerans migrated into the Philippines prior to
the arrival of rice agriculture, where some remain as the least admixed East Asians carrying an
ancestry shared by all Austronesian-speaking populations, thereby challenging an exclusive out-
of-Taiwan model of joint farming–language–people dispersal. Altogether, our findings portray
the Philippines as a crucial gateway, with a multilayered history, that ultimately changed the
genetic landscape of the Asia-Pacific region. Basilan officials say the island is now safe from the
Abu Sayyaf separatists who began their fight in 1991. No foreign fighters are hiding in the
jungles, the local authorities insist, and they claim that the rebels have been reduced to about
20 trapped stragglers.But Colonel Besana puts the overall number of militants on Basilan at
perhaps 200, and their leader has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Our analyses indicate
that, after Negrito, Manobo, and Sama-like northward migrations, gene flow of Cordilleran-
related ancestry from the Southern China/Taiwan area into the Philippines may have occurred
in multiple pulses after ∼10 kya. This may explain the inferred (genetic) divergence between
Amis and central Cordillerans being younger than the divergence between Cordillerans and
various groups of the central and northern Philippines (SI Appendix, Figs S7E and S8 K–R).
Furthermore, we do not observe a north-to-south gradient of chronology for Negrito/Papuan–
Cordilleran admixture (SI Appendix, Fig. S8U and Table S7Q), which would be expected in a
simplistic and stepwise unidirectional movement of Cordilleran-related ancestry from Luzon to
Mindanao. On the contrary, the oldest dates for Negrito/Papuan–Cordilleran admixture are
scattered throughout the archipelago, indicating a complex nonuniform movement of
populations from a putative South China/Taiwan source area into the Philippines.