The End of Innocence.(violence erupts in Davao, Philippines)

Standing next to a bomb crater filled with white candle stubs in memory of the dead, Mayor Rodrigo Duterte says he had "a kind of respect" for Philippine rebels until they brought their fight into his city, Davao. As headlights from late-evening traffic flash across his face, Duterte points to where he found a boy's body after the latest bomb went off on April 2 outside the local ferry terminal, and to a nearby parking lot where a victim's leg was found. There were 16 deaths in all, and Duterte is out for revenge--cracking down on Muslim separatists and retracting his embrace of the Muslim community.

Davao became a battlefield in the decades-long Philippine war on Muslim separatism only this March, when a bomb at the airport killed 22 people and wounded 155. Then came the ferry-terminal attack and the end of innocence for this city of 1.4 million, once known for tropical fruit and the relative absence of crime, poverty and strife between the Catholic majority and a 4 percent Muslim minority.

After the attacks, Philippine military intelligence fingered a splinter group of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front with alleged ties to Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia. The territory of both the Muslim front and communist rebels begins in the hills outside Davao, but political violence has not been suspected inside the city for at least a decade. The front denied involvement and condemned the bombings, but Duterte is sure it's involved, and he has begun to dial back a four-term record of reaching out to Muslims. "When the second bomb exploded, I heard not a ...