Liberated Philippines city lies in ruins
Residents angry with Islamic State, but also blame Duterte, U.S.
MARAWI, Philippines — More than six months after Filipino and foreign fighters claiming allegiance to the Islamic State stormed this lakeside city, setting off a monthslong war with U.S.-backed Philippine troops, liberated Marawi lies in ruins and its people seethe.
The heart of the city has been bombed and burned beyond recognition, its domed mosques pierced by mortar fire. Homes stand roofless, blackened. There are armored vehicles on the streets.
Some 200,000 residents are still scattered across the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, living with weary relatives or in displacement camps thick with mud and worry.
Those who have been allowed to return found their homes sacked and looted — safes open, jewelry snatched, appliances gone.
Many are angry at the men who seized their city in a failed bid to establish a caliphate, taking hostages and targeting civilians. They are angry, too, at the forces that fought those men, namely the Philippine army and its backer, the United States.
Beyond earshot of officials and soldiers, people wonder why the army was so quick to pummel their predominantly Muslim city. They are also suspicious of the role played by U.S. Special Forces.
With Islamic State fighters losing ground in Iraq and Syria, men and money may shift to Southeast Asia, experts have said. They will find in the southern Philippines an angry and vulnerable population, institutions racked by war, and a government, led by President Rodrigo Duterte, that sees shooting as a way to solve social problems.
In other words: prime recruiting grounds.
In that sense, what happened in Marawi is not the success that Mr. Duterte claims but a lesson in the limits of fighting extremism with force alone.
“Armed operations will never erase or exterminate the causes and roots of terror,” said Samira Ali GutocTomawis, a local official who quit her job over Duterte’s handling of the conflict. “You can’t kill an idea.”
••• The roots of the Marawi conflict run far and deep, stretching from the southern Philippines across Southeast Asia to the Middle East. It’s a local conflict swept up in the globalization of extremism.
For Minhati Madrais, of Bekasi, Indonesia, Marawi started as a love story and ended in a war.
Ms. Madrais left Indonesia as a young woman to study at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. There, she met Omarkhayam Maute, who is Maranao, a predominantly Muslim group from the area around Marawi. “He was the first man who ever liked me,” she said.
They married in Egypt, lived and worked in Indonesia, then moved to Mindanao in 2011.
Mr. Maute and his brother, Abdullah, came from a prosperous clan with ties to the leadership of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an insurgent group that has fought for decades for autonomy for Muslim groups on Mindanao.
In recent years, the Moro Front has been engaged in fitful peace negotiations with the government. Some fighters have split off, fed up with the process, or attracted to the ideology, ferocity and self styled purity of foreign terrorist groups — among them the Islamic State.
In 2013, Omarkhayam decamped to a family property outside Marawi, Ms. Madrais said. She stayed in the city, bringing the children to visit when he called. He never came to them. “Checkpoints were too dangerous,” she said.
At some point, the brothers started working with other groups, including a band of men loyal to one of the world’s most-wanted militants, Isnilon Hapilon, who pledged loyalty to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014.
Experts are still trying to understand the force they assembled, particularly the precise nature of their links to the Islamic State, said Shashi Jayakumar, who heads the Center for Excellence in National Security..
Philippine groups have a long history of claiming allegiance to foreign forces in a bid to gain credibility through what Jayakumar called the “veneer of jihadism.”
Whatever its ties, the Hapilon and Maute group was formidable. “This was a significant force, with significant preparation. It hit everyone by surprise,” Jayakumar said.
In late May, Philippine troops stormed a compound in Marawi, expecting to make some arrests. Instead, they set off fighting that lasted more than 150 days.