Trump Calls Kim Jong Un ‘Mad Man’ In Call With Philippine President

Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar said, however, the department will not increase the number of personnel required for the task.

But in the Philippines, there was also widespread criticism of the Rappler, a local newspaper that worked with the Intercept to publish the transcript A Facebook post by the paper linking to the story was immediately slammed with dozens of comments saying the report had compromised national security in the Philippines because it contained revelations that the United States has two nuclear submarines in waters near North Korea, according to Trump. The group has been blamed for the most vile terror attacks in the Philippines, including the bombing of a Manila Bay ferry in 2004 that killed more than 100 people.

Days before President Donald Trump said that he would be “honored” to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump appeared to be singing a different tune to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte during a private phone call in April.

Thousands of people have fled the city, said Mary Jo Henry, an emergency response official.

Civilians have also flooded out of the city to escape the violence, which one witness described to Al-Jazeera as unrelenting.

For quite some time Duterte has been warning citizens, he was prepared to use martial law to eliminate ISIS threats he felt were hampering safety levels in the Philippines. “Martial Law is not the answer; it will never result to anything but gross violations of people’s rights”, said Cristina Palabay, Karapatan secretary general. Human Rights Watch has called Operation Double Barrel “a campaign of extrajudicial execution in impoverished areas of Manila and other urban areas”.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, a controversial figure who has strained relations with the Philippines’ traditional ally, America, and is seeking “realignment with China, is himself a native of Mindanao Island, and has served as the Mayor of Davao, the island’s largest city”.

Duterte has long threatened martial law to destroy the Maute group and the allied Abu Sayyaf, which he warns are trying to create an Islamic State presence in the Christian-majority Philippines.

Duterte, who has been called “The Punisher”, told President Trump drugs cause a lot of suffering in the Philippines.

“We will conduct house-to-house clearing and do everything to remove the threat there. We can do that easily”, Gen Eduardo Año said, adding that it was more hard in an urban setting because of the need to avoid civilian casualties. Tass news agency said President Vladimir Putin would see him before his departure Tuesday night, instead of on Thursday as planned.

Discussing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the USA president told his Philippine counterpart that the United States has a lot of “fire power” on and off the peninsula.

“If it would take a year to do it then we’ll do it”.

Trump said he fully understood, and added that he thought the U.S. “The Mautes are embedded in the population”.

Two soldiers and a policeman were killed and 12 wounded amid chaos in Marawi, a predominantly Muslim city of about 200,000 people, where members of the Maute militant group took control of buildings and set fire to a school, a church and a detention facility. A military raid on their jungle camp last month reportedly found homemade bombs, grenades, combat uniforms, and passports of suspected Indonesian militants.