IS funded siege: Año
CLARK FREEPORT -The Islamic State group sent at least $1.5 million to finance the recently ended siege of the southern Philippine city of Marawi, with the assault leaders using the 2014 IS seizure of the Iraqi city of Mosul as a blueprint, the Philippine military chief said.
The battle defeats of the brutal group in Syria and Iraq, and now the IS-aligned gunmen in Marawi, however, show a major vulnerability of the extremists: Their audacious territorial occupations tend to crumble over time as they’re cornered in urban settings by the relentless firepower of USbacked offensives, Gen. Eduardo Ano said in an interview with The Associated Press late Monday.
The counterterrorism victories have given governments confidence that IS — which shocked the world with its rise a few years ago — could be stopped and defeated, said Ano, who oversaw the military campaign that ended the five-month siege in Marawi this week.
“They underestimated the reaction of the different countries in the world, the alliances,” he said.
“With what happened in Mosul, the Philippines and Raqqa, the different countries are now confident that if ever an ISIS siege would erupt ... they now have the recipe or the formula to fight it,” Ano said, adding that the Philippine military is ready to
share its battle experiences in mosque-studded Marawi.
The siege, which was launched on May 23, left more than 1,100 combatants and civilians dead, including more than 900 militants, and displaced some 400,000 residents, including the entire population of Marawi, a bastion of the Islamic faith in the predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines. Military airstrikes, artillery and heavy machine-gun fire turned the lakeside city’s central business district and outlying communities into a smoldering wasteland of disfigured buildings and bullet-pocked mosques and houses.
It was one of the most devastating urban fights the country has witnessed since World War II, the military chief said.
Like in Mosul, the black-flag waving militants plotted to launch the Marawi siege on the first day of Ramadan, the holy Muslim month of fasting, but they were forced to stage the attack prematurely after Philippine army troops raided the hideout of its leaders. They also took hundreds of hostages as human shields and employed snipers to slow the advance of the military, Ano said. ASP(For full story visit www.sunstar.com.ph/ davao/)