Marawi, three months
AUGUST 23, marked the third month since the Maute group attacked parts of Marawi City, forcing President Rodrigo Duterte to declare martial law in Mindanao initially for 60 days, which Congress later extended until the end of 2017.
There are signs the crisis is being contained. Of the 135 evacuation centers that operated at the height of the conflict, only 75 remain open in 16 towns in Lanao del Sur and del Norte. But the suffering caused by the Marawi conflict continues.
As of last Monday, 359,680 persons (nearly 78,500 families) remained displaced. Most have moved to other parts of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and Northern Mindanao, which each hosts more than 35,000 families of the internally displaced.
The other displaced families fanned out across seven other regions, including Central Visayas, where some 167 families or 715 persons have moved since the conflict began. These internally displaced individuals have received some help.
A Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) report provided to Relief Web showed that as of Monday, about P228.8 million in food and other forms of assistance from the agency have been distributed. Yet part of their suffering — the uncertainty and inability to make plans — remains.
The military must be sick by now of questions about when they can free all of Marawi from the Maute group’s clutches. But people need to have some idea of when this threat can be licked. It’s not just Marawi’s residents who need to know. So do counter-terrorism and defense officials in Indonesia, Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia.
The longer Marawi remains in the grip of the Maute group, the greater the risk that it can gain more support (resources and recruits, for example) from the Islamic State’s terrorist network. The longer Marawi remains in terror’s grip, the larger the toll on its physical and civic infrastructure will be, and the harder it will be to build agai n.
The last thing this country needs is for Marawi to experience what has happened to Mosul. After three years of ISIS occupation and urban warfare, that once proud Iraqi city is broken. Rubble fills the space that used to be its commercial districts and thousands of homes, and an estimated four million of its people remain scattered. We cannot let that happen to Marawi.