Merchants of death in Marawi

Twenty years after obtaining Christian educations, Muslim brothers Omarkhayam and Abdullah Maute returned to their southern Philippine city with the black flags of the Islamic State group and set fire to their alma mater.

Hundreds of gunmen, many of them young locals recruited by the Maute brothers, destroyed Dansalan College in a rampage across Marawi city last month as they launched a brutal offensive to stamp their credentials as Philippine leaders of IS. It turned the siblings, aged in their mid 30s, into the most infamous high school alumni of the Protestant Church-run institution, which had been a symbol of religious tolerance in the mostly Muslim city of 200,000 people.

The brothers have since remained holed up in parts of Marawi, using their local knowledge of tunnels and bomb-proof basements, to withstand a military offensive that has left entire neighbourhoods in ruins and claimed more than 300 lives.

“We do not understand where that hate is coming from,” said Zia Alonto Adiong, a member of the regional parliament in a self-ruled Muslim area in the southern Philippines’ Mindanao region that includes Marawi.

Duma Sani, an ex-dean of Mindanao State University, whose daughter also went to school with one of the Maute brothers, said most locals did not support their radical brand of Islam.