Army says taking fire from women, children
Marawi fighting intensifies
MARAWI CITY, Philippines, Sept 5, (Agencies): Philippine troops fighting Islamic State-linked rebels in a southern city have encountered armed resistance from women and children, the military said on Monday, as troops make a final push to end a conflict that has raged for more than 100 days.
Ground forces were braced for higher casualties amid fierce fighting in Marawi City on the island of Mindanao, where the field of battle has shrank to a small area in a commercial heart infested with snipers, and littered with booby traps.
“We are now in the final phase of our operations and we are expecting more intense and bloody fighting. We may suffer heavier casualties as the enemy becomes more desperate,” Lieutenant General Carlito Galvez, who heads the military in Western Mindanao, told reporters.
He said the number of fighters was diminishing and a small number of women and children, most likely family members of the rebels, were now engaged in combat.
“Our troops in the field are seeing women and children shooting at our troops so that’s why it seems they are not running out of fighters.” More than 800 people have been killed in the battle, most of them insurgents, since May 23 when the militants occupied large parts of the predominantly Muslim town.
The battle is the biggest security challenge in years for the mostly Catholic Philippines, even though it has a long history of Muslim separatist rebellion in Mindanao, an island of 22 million people that has been placed under martial law until the end of the year.
The protracted clashes and resilience of the rebels has fanned fears that Philippine groups loyal to Islamic State, and with ties to Indonesian and Malaysian militants, have formed an alliance that is well-organised, funded and armed, and serious about carving out its own territory in Mindanao.
Citing information provided by four hostages who had escaped from the rebels, Galvez said there were some 56 Christian hostages — most of them women — and about 80 male residents may have been forced to take up arms and fight the military.
The fighting was concentrated in an area around a mosque about a quarter of a square kilometre. He said soldiers were taking control of an average 35 buildings a day and at that rate, it could be three weeks before the city was under government control.
Fighting in Marawi was intense on Monday, with heavy gunfire and explosions ringing out across the picturesque, lakeside town, the heart of which has been devastated by near-daily government air strikes.
Helicopters circled above to provide air cover for ground troops as fighting raged, with bursts of smoke rising above the skyline as bombs landed on rebel positions.
Galvez
Accused murderer Manuel Cerna has languished in a Philippine jail for 15 years without a verdict, one of countless inmates enduring interminable trials that are expected to get longer as an unrelenting drug war overwhelms the courts.
A notoriously slow and under-resourced judicial system has seen a “tidal wave” of new cases as police have conducted a nationwide crime crackdown in response to President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to eradicate all illegal drugs from Philippine society.
The case of Cerna, 60, who almost died of tuberculosis in one of the nation’s most overcrowded jails as his hearings dragged on, is not unusual in that his time in jail while on trial is close to reaching the minimum sentence.
“I get depressed. Some others here committed suicide because their wives left them. They lost all hope of freedom,” Cerna told AFP in the Manila jail surrounded by rusting barbed wire and the stench of rotting food.
So-called “decader” inmates — because they have spent 10 years or more behind bars while on trial — are a symptom of a deeply flawed justice system that helped fuel Duterte’s rise to the presidency last year.
Duterte won the elections on a brutal law-and-order platform, promising swift justice chiefly by killing tens of thousands of criminals and a no-mercy stance on convicted criminals who he said could not be rehabilitated.
Duterte’s police have indeed shot dead thousands of people as they have scoured slums hunting drug traffickers and addicts, leading rights groups to express alarm at what they say are a wave of extrajudicial killings.
This has undoubtedly avoided many trials.
MANILA:
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The Philippine police chief denied on Tuesday any policy to kill drug suspects, telling a Senate hearing into the bloodshed that President Rodrigo Duterte had never told him to “kill and kill”.
Duterte took office in June last year after winning an election on a vow to get tough on drugs and crime. He soon launched a “war on drugs” in which thousands of people have been killed.
Duterte and his campaign remain popular but opposition to the bloodshed, including from within the influential Catholic church, has begun to build.
The death of 17-year-old boy, Kian Loyd delos Santos, last month, after he was dragged off by plainclothes anti-drug policemen into a dark alley, has stirred public outrage.
National police chief Ronald dela Rosa, called to testify at a Senate inquiry, dismissed any suggestion there was an official policy to summarily kill suspects.
“We will die for the innocent people. It’s painful to say there’s a policy of widespread killings,” Dela Rosa, appearing to fight back emotion, told the televised hearing. “The president never told me to kill and kill.” The stocky police general, nicknamed “Bato”, or the rock, was responding to questions about the killing of delos Santos.
Police say they acted in self defence after delos Santos opened fire on them.
Senator Risa Hontiveros, a staunch critic of Duterte, told the hearing the police “should never be used as a killing machine”.
“There’s a wide policy that allows the killings in the name of war on drugs,” Hontiveros said.
Dela Rosa said he would step down if she could prove her accusation.
According to police records, more than 3,800 people, most of them drug suspects, have died in police operations since July last year. Police say most were killed resisting arrest.