Many residents still can’t return 1 year after siege
MARAWI, Philippines — Thousands of displaced residents remain in emergency shelters and the threat of Islamic extremists and unexploded bombs lingers in the rubble of a southern Philippine city, where survivors on Wednesday remembered a disastrous fivemonth siege by Islamic State group-aligned fighters that began a year ago.
The Rev. Teresito Soganub, who survived 117 days of captivity by the extremists in Marawi city, said that aside from the devastation, it would take years for him and other civilians to overcome the horror of having lived through air strikes and gunbattles that threatened them day and night.
“I’m still very, very far from a full recovery,” Soganub said by telephone. “If it takes long to rebuild and reconstruct, it’s more difficult to deal with this psychological and psychiatric trauma.”
The government is finalizing a plan to rebuild the most devastated commercial and residential districts, where the carcasses of pockmarked homes, buildings and mosques stand eerily and gathering weeds in an urban wasteland guarded by troops.
The city’s journey back to normalcy may take years at a huge cost, said officials, some of whom have warned that if the rehabilitation falters, the restiveness it would generate could be exploited by Muslim militants.
“There were lots of bullets, a lot of cannon fire and air strikes that targeted us because we were with the Islamic State group that was being pounded by troops,” Soganub said from his southern home province, where he held Mass with family and friends. “Each day of the 117 days, 24 hours, we were facing death every time and our lives depended on the temperament of our hostage takers.”
Residents, officials and military officers released dozens of white balloons and doves into the blue sky from a government complex in lakeside Marawi and prayed for peace and recovery.
The May 23 siege that was crushed in October killed more than 1,100 mostly militants, left the mosque-studded city’s heartland in rubbles, prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to place the southern third of the country under martial law and reinforced fears that the Islamic State was gaining a foothold in the Asian region. The months of intense fighting forced hundreds of thousands of residents of Marawi and outlying towns to flee for their lives.
While many have returned after the attack was quelled, thousands more whose houses were destroyed in the main battle area that remains offlimits to civilians are still living in evacuation centers and temporary shelters, officials said.