SMART, ARTICULATE

The Mautes were a monied family in a close-knit tribal society where respect, honor and the Koran are paramount.

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Jo-Ar Herrera said the “Maranao” clan, to which the Mautes belong, has a matriarchal tradition, and so their mother played a central role.

He said Farhana Maute, who according to the neighbor had furniture and used-car businesses, helped finance the group, and she drove recruitment and radicalization of local youths.

On Friday, she was stopped outside Marawi in a vehicle loaded with firearms and explosives and taken into custody. It was a major blow for the militants, according to Mr. Herrera, as she had been the “heart of the Maute organization.”

A day previously, the brothers’ father, an engineer, was arrested in Davao City, 250 km. away.

When the Marawi siege began, several hundred militants were involved, including men from nations as far away as Morocco and Yemen.

But most of the marauders, who took civilians as human shields and torched the town cathedral, were from four local groups allied to the IS, and in the lead were the Maute, military officials said.

According to Mr. Jones, the Maute group has “the smartest, best-educated and most sophisticated members” of all the pro-Islamic State outfits in the Philippines.

Samira Gutoc-Tomawis, a local civic leader who knows some of the Maute’s extended family, said the brothers rely heavily on social media to recruit young followers and spread their “rigid and authoritarian” ideology.

“The Mautes are very active online. On YouTube, they upload their ideas” she said. “They are articulate, they are educated, they are idealistic.”

The Maute family’s neighbor, who requested anonymity for his own safety, said the group’s fighters are fearless too.

He was trapped for five days in his three-story house last month watching the battle between the militants and the Philippines armed forces unfold, with sniper fire pinging around him and OV-10 aircraft bombing from above.

“During the bombing runs of the OV-10, they just carried on eating biscuits, not running for cover,” he said.

On May 28, a group of seven fighters — he recognized Omarkhayam among them — came to his house and asked why he had not left. When he told them that he feared being caught in the crossfire, they guided him and several others to a bridge leading out of town and gave them a white cloth to wave.

‘I WANT TO KILL THEM NOW’

The Maute group first surfaced in 2013 with the bombing of a nightclub in nearby Cagayan de Oro. Its stature had grown since, most notably with the bombing last year of a street market in President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s hometown of Davao City.

Maute members who were captured said the Davao attack was ordered by Isnilon Hapilon of the Abu Sayyaf, a group that has fought since the 1990s for an independent Islamic province but is as well-known as a vicious gang of criminals and kidnappers.

Hapilon, whom the IS named last year as its “emir” in Southeast Asia, was seen in a video that emerged last week showing the militants — including two Maute brothers — plotting to seal Marawi off as a separate enclave.

Mr. Herrera said the Mautes enjoy strong support in Marawi.

“This is their place, this is where their family is, this is where their culture is, this is where the heritage is. There is a huge sympathetic perspective towards the ... Maute,” he said.

But Khana-Anuar Marabur, Jr., a Marawi town councilor, said the Mautes had made enemies in the area with their radicalism.

He said he went to the brothers on the day the attack on Marawi was launched and they told him to leave the town.

“They told me to leave because the caliphate ... had ordered it,” Mr. Marabur told Reuters. “They treated me like an enemy.

“I want to kill them now,” he said. —