Philippine troops find cash as fighters pull back
The military said over the past 24 hours it had taken several buildings that had been defended by snipers
Manila: Philippine troops found bundles of bank notes and cheques worth about US$1.6 million (FJ$ 3.3m) that had been abandoned by Islamist militants holed up in Marawi, a discovery that the military said on Tuesday was evidence that the fighters were pulling back.
Fighters linked to Islamic State have been cornered in a built-up sliver of the southern lakeside town after two weeks of intense combat. The military said that over the past 24 hours it had taken several buildings that had been defended by snipers. In one house they found a vault loaded with neat stacks of money worth 52.2 million pesos (US$2.01m) and cheques made out for cash worth 27 million pesos (FJ$1.14m).
“The recovery of those millions of cash indicates that they are running because the government troops are pressing in and focusing on destroying them,” Marines Operations Officer Rowan Rimas told a news conference in the town as helicopters on machine-gun runs buzzed overhead.
Black smoke poured from an area near one of the town’s mosques and the lake after bombings by OV-10 attack aircraft and artillery fire from the ground.
The battle for Marawi has raised concerns that the ultra-radical Islamic State, on a back foot in Syria and Iraq, is building a regional base on the Philippine island of Mindanao.
Officials said that, among the several hundred militants who seized the town on May 23, there were about 40 foreigners from neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia, but also from India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Chechnya.
Mr Ano said an estimated 100 Maute militants were holding out, and the military was checking on a report that one of its founding leaders, Omar Maute, had been killed in an airstrike.
On Monday, President Rodrigo Duterte offered a bounty of 10 million pesos (FJ$417,909m) to anyone who “neutralised” Hapilon, and 5 million pesos for each of the two leaders of the Maute group, one of four factions that banded together to take the town.