Marawi siege ‘start of extremist plan’
Ramadan plot was to project IS influence
MARAWI CITY: Militants who have occupied much of a southern Philippines city over the past week were planning violent attacks during the holy month of Ramadan to earn recognition as a regional branch of the Islamic State (IS), the military said yesterday.
Soldiers have taken control of about 70% of Marawi, where the gunmen have been fending off the army for a week, military chief of staff Gen Eduardo Ano said. About 100 militants, troops and civilians have been killed.
“They wanted to show the world that there is an Isis branch here which can inflict the kind of violence that has been seen in Syria and Iraq,” Gen Ano said, using an acronym for the IS.
The siege in Marawi followed an unsuccessful army raid that attempted to capture militant commander Isnilon Hapilon, who has been designated by the IS as its leader in the Philippines. Mr Hapilon escaped and gunmen loyal to him besieged this mostly Muslim city of 200,000 people, torching buildings and taking hostages. Gen Ano said the gunmen were prepared to fight because of their Ramadan attack plot.
The unrest has boosted fears that the IS group’s violent ideology is gaining a foothold in this country’s restive southern islands, where a Muslim separatist rebellion has raged for decades.
President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the south through mid-July, but lawmakers yesterday asked for a public session of Congress to determine whether martial law is still necessary. His declaration unnerved Filipinos who lived through the rule of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who declared martial law in 1972 and used it to hold power for more than a decade.
The army insists the drawn-out fight in Marawi is not a true sign of the militants’ strength, and that the military has held back to spare civilians’ lives.
As of yesterday morning, Gen Ano said the military, working house-by-house, had cleared 70% of the city and the remaining militants were isolated. Still, the fighters have turned out to be remarkably wellarmed and resilient.
In recent years, small militant groups in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia have begun unifying under the banner of the IS. Jose Calida, the top Philippine prosecutor, said last week that the violence on the large southern island of Mindanao “is no longer a rebellion of Filipino citizens”.
Three Malaysians, an Indonesian and possibly Arab extremists have been killed in the Marawi fighting, Gen Ano said, citing the latest intelligence on the matter. He said Mr Hapilon was still hiding somewhere in the city and that authorities were working to confirm another top militant had been killed. At least 65 militants have been killed and 15 Philippine troops, Gen Ano said. The bodies of 19 civilians have been recovered and local authorities have reported more civilian deaths still to be tallied.
Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at Singapore’s S Rarajatnam School of International Studies, said the fighting in Marawi, along with smaller battles elsewhere in the southern Philippines, may be precursors to declaring a province, which would be “a huge success for the terrorists”.
Last week, two suicide bombings in Jakarta, Indonesia, killed three police officers, an attack claimed by IS. While Indonesia has been fighting local militants since 2002, the rise of the IS group has breathed new life into those militant networks and raised concern about the risk of Indonesian fighters returning home from the Middle East.
Experts have warned that as the IS is weakened in Syria and Iraq, battered by years of US-led attacks, Mindanao could become a focal point for regional fighters.
Southeast Asian fighters fleeing the Middle East “could look to Mindanao to provide temporary refuge as they work their way home”, said a report late last year by the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, predicting a high risk of regional violence. Marawi is regarded as the heartland of the Islamic faith on Mindanao island.
Gen Ano said yesterday the extremists had plotted to set Marawi ablaze entirely to project the IS’s influence. The extremists wanted to kill Christians in nearby Iligan city on Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, to mimic the violence seen by the world in Syria and Iraq, Gen Ano said.
The fighters’ support network in Marawi remains unclear, though the power of one militant group — the Mautes — has grown in recent years. Led by members of the city’s Maute clan, the group has become increasingly active in a number of towns across the province and has been instrumental in the fighting this past week.
Mr Hapilon is former commander of the Abu Sayyaf who pledged allegiance to the IS in 2014. He now heads an alliance of at least 10 smaller militant groups, including the Maute.