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Factors and forces that led to the Marawi debacle

(The following
article is an excerpt from a case study written by the author for the
project, “Violence, Human Rights, and Democracy in the
Philippines.” The project is a joint undertaking by the Third World
Studies Center, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University
of the Philippines Diliman and the Conflict Research Group,
Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University).

Philippine flag is raised in Marawi in the midst of the siege June 2017. Photo by Luis Liwanag.



The battle of Marawi in 2017, in the heart of the Islamic city in Lanao del Sur province, deviated into violent extremism that opened more fears for the future in what was an undertaking by mostly a generation of millennial fighters. The siege that lasted five months, from May to October, was unprecedented in magnitude, challenging the military in doctrine and tactics, and prompting daily sorties of air strikes that reduced Marawi to a state of destruction. It was unbelievable that two principal brothers of a family attached to the political and business elite of the Maranaos – the Muslim ethnic tribe of Lanao del Sur – had raised the stakes of Islamism beyond the call for autonomy in a fractured land.

Butig- the seedbed

It was in the
town of Butig, where events leading up to the battle in Marawi,
inspired a vision of creating an Islamic state. The sight of poverty
recedes out to the meadow in the wide green space, turning into
forest trails that lead to a well-hidden encampment – an ideal spot
to hide and train a rebel army. It was there where smaller camps
around the border and into the neighboring Maguindanao province that
the Jemaah Islamiyah trained in their cadetship of a clandestine
military school. It was in Butig where they trained with neophyte
fighters from Indonesia and Malaysia whose ties with Filipino rebels
formed – over a period of time in scattered shifts of their
ideologies – a certain kinship. They developed smaller secret cells
for trainings that broke up after the military campaign in 2000.
Those who stayed in Butig came into contact, eventually, with the
Maute brothers whose family was a mainstay in the town politics and
linked to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front as well.

When the MILF
abandoned Camp Darul Iman in Butig after successive military air
strikes in 2016, the brothers took over what was left of it and held
their trainings there. The army would attack the camp during what it
called its Haribon campaign, named after the brigade unit based in
Marawi. This campaign was alternately called the Butig campaign,
referring to its location.

The Mautes and
Abu Dar

Omarkhayam and
Abdullah belonged a family that became known popularly as the Maute
Group. The Maute brothers began their jihad in early 2014. The
brothers’ graduate degrees from abroad were the shining scepter of
their authority. There was a third man in this partnership, an
unknown rebel who goes by the alias Abu Dar, the head of the local
Khalifa Islamiya Movement. Abu Dar was involved in bombings in the
neighboring Christian cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro. He joined
the brothers to bring their forces together and this was how the
so-called Maute Group was formed.

In Butig, the
supposed center of the soon-to-evolve ISIS community, the Maute
brothers and Abu Dar conducted a “seminar” in October 2014, where
about 40 participants went through some heavy soul-searching,
complete with full confessions and weeping. They were supposedly to
purify themselves of their sins and vices like smoking, drinking, and
fornication. They were told that this was the way to repent. They
could atone for their sins as well as intercede in behalf of seventy
family members in their lineage. Was this the beginning of
radicalization? Was this going to be a one-way ticket to heaven?
Could they erase their sins in the name of jihad, which was going to
be the “roof to protect the community”? Sharia law was rarely
practiced by Filipino Muslims. It was only in ISIS and in Pakistan,
Brunei, and Saudi Arabia that punishment of stoning for certain
instances of fornication was done. By introducing this to a future of
the Islamic State, the Maute leaders hoped to turn the world of
Filipino Muslims – one that was generally moderate, secular, and
still adhering to folk mysticism – upside down. If the recruits
felt they knew very little of what true Islam was, in this “seminar”
they finally found their true education. The seminar was a hard blow
to their conscience and there was no letup in changing minds and
hearts until their leaders were convinced of a full conversion.

In the last phase
of the seminar, the recruits were ordered to familiarize themselves
with weapons. They were shown a Rocket Propelled Grenade, or an
R.P.G. – the kind of weapon that paralyzed military armors in the
first days of the Marawi siege. They were told that, by way of
hadith, even just carrying a weapon was going to make them blessed,
which would come with heavenly rewards. They were then made to walk
for an hour from their bare lodging to an open field that was to be
their training ground. They went through a ring of fire, they crawled
in and out of tunnels, their adrenalin fueled when live bullets
rained on them. The training was supposed to give them a sense of how
it was to be in a real firefight. At the end of the training, they
marched in a parade like an army that was born. Abdullah led them,
riding on a horse and waving a black banner with an Arabic emblem
that said “There is no god but Allah. Mohammad is the messenger of
Allah.”

By the time they
returned to Camp Darul Iman in Butig later that year (in December
2014), they had completed their all-around training. It was time to
fight, to become martyrs and absolve themselves and their families of
their sins. In that meeting, Abdullah did most of the talking while
Abu Dar quietly stood at the back. Omarkhayam was the brother, eager
for the trigger, who would draw first blood. In February 2016, in an
operation called Butig 1, he led an attack against an army detachment
in Butig’s town hall. Abdullah apparently did not know about his
brother’s plan to give the young recruits their baptism of fire.
When the army fought back, Abdullah was forced to bring in
reinforcement of about fifty men and the firefight lasted for days,
this time with bombs and artillery. Abdullah was upset at his brother
for having done such a thing. “The enemy is here,” Omarkhayam was
quoted as having told his younger brother, “Why do I need to ask
permission to launch an attack? The enemy is here, why shouldn’t we
fight?” The military believed it was Abu Dar who reinforced
Omarkhayam’s unprovoked attack on the military detachment. Butig 1
yielded political dividends for the Maute Group. A senior-ranking
fighter said the group first had a small army of thirty that grew to
about two hundred forces, and by the time the battle of Marawi
started they had about six hundred fighting against government forces
to gain control of Lanao del Sur’s capital.

A report by Gail
Tan Ilagan of the Ateneo de Davao University, “Toward Countering
Recruitment to Violent Extremism in Mindanao,” stated that in
mainland Mindanao (i.e. Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur provinces),
mosques and the madrasa schools, especially funded by money from
Saudi Arabia, were reported to be places for potential recruits
“identified through their devout worship, their regular
participation in Islamic seminars, and the kind of earnest questions
they ask during such gatherings.” While the boarding schools of the
toril essentially confine their students and hold them captive to
extremist indoctrinations, “there is little indication of the
success of mass recruitment if indeed such is being attempted in the
first place.” In Marawi the torils were known to be the parents’
last resort for delinquent children, but for some who found out that
their children were being trained in Butig under harsh conditions and
in some extreme cases, were sent to tiny, isolated islands on the
lake, they attempted to take them back. The orphans were much an easy
prey.

The grand mosque in Marawi. October 2018. Photo by Johnna Villaviray-Giolagon


Butig
2/Haribon 2 broke out three months after the first one, in May 2016.
The military was able to identify four small encampments in the Butig
hideout, and began firing artillery in their direction. There were
fighters from the Maute group that were training in Piagapo, near
west of Marawi. They came to the rescue of the fighters in Butig and
they were able to bring the battle back against the military before
the start of the Ramadan in June. The fighters were told that
striking during the Holy Month would mean having their heavenly
rewards multiplied. But the military bombardment had taken its toll.
Many were wounded and escaped to the lake using a banca to seek
medical assistance elsewhere. After Butig 2/Haribon 2, the
group continued recruiting among close relatives, school children and
orphans. Rouge fighters from the MILF and the breakaway Bangsamoro
Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) also joined, beefing up a force, not
of ragtag, but young solid fighters.

The arrival of
Hapilon

By December 2016,
there were random air strikes leading up to what would next become
Butig 3/Haribon 3. The rebels were caught off guard, retreating to
the hinterland border of Maguindanao. There they stayed silent. Some
of the fighters had heard that one of the Abu Sayyaf leaders,
Isnilon Hapilon, was coming from Basilan island to join them. The
military had information that he landed by boat along the
northwestern coast by Illana Bay, along with fifty passengers who
supposedly included foreign fighters. This was the basis for the
third operation, believing that after such a heavy bombardment
Hapilon might have gotten killed or wounded. By all accounts, this
was big news. But Hapilon actually did not arrive in Lanao until the
second week of January 2017, according to one of the fighters, when
the Maute brothers’ group had already settled back in Butig after
the military operation. He had his own team of men, including his
son, and was given his own camp where only Abdullah and Omarkhayam
could see him.

The young
fighters in Butig were in awe of Hapilon, coming face-to-face with
the warrior who had been around since the inception of the Abu Sayyaf
in Sulu in the late 1990s. Following an inspirational speech by
Hapilon during a private and personal meeting, the fighters moved to
Piagapo, crossing the Lake Lanao and settling by the site near a
tower that was once an American settlement in the colonial days of
the early 1900s.The group stayed there for about a month, during
which there was talk of a big Marawi operation, similar to what they
had heard when Hapilon came to Butig. The other fighters, about one
hundred of them, set up camp surreptitiously and separately in the
barangays around Marawi. A big plan was afoot.

Then in April
2017, the army brigade commander in Marawi asked for more troops when
reports filtered in that there was going to be another attack. When
elite special forces moved into Piagapo, fighting ensued. Piagapo was
relatively a progressive town compared to others in Lanao del Sur
province, and the local government more or less cooperated with the
military in house searches after the Piagapo operation that took over
the rebel camp and dismantled their base.

Military mistake

It took Air Force
strikes to stop the rebels and they thought that was the end of it,
and that it would take time before the rebels could regroup and
strike somewhere else. As it turned out, the military was very
wrong. Soon after conducting the Piagapo operations, their attention
was suddenly diverted towards going after communist rebels operating
at the border into Bukidnon on the eastern flank of Lanao del Sur.
The army camp in Marawi was left vulnerable with only about a company
on guard. This explains why, despite receiving naval intelligence
reports all the way from the Western Command in Zamboanga, warning of
an impending threat by Hapilon and his comrades, the local command
was in no position to prevent the rebels’ siege of Marawi on May
23.

k9 units. Marawi Oct 2018. Photo by Johnna Villaviray Giolagon

The battle of
Marawi was officially declared over after the military killed Isnilon
Hapilon and Omarkhayam Maute in mid-October 2017. Abdullah Maute,
too, was believed killed earlier in the siege but there have been no
reports of his body being retrieved. Abu Dar escaped and tried to put
a new army together. His plan was short-lived; he was killed in a
firefight with an army platoon in mid-March 2019, in an area a mere
30 kilometers from Butig. Marawi, however, has never recovered from
the battle. It remains a devastated area and its residents still to
receive the government aid promised by President Rodrigo Duterte who,
later in his speeches, relinquished those promises to rebuild Marawi,
saying there were enough wealthy Maranao families who could provide
the needed help. He also blamed the illegal drug trade and corruption
money as impetus for the violence. By reducing the causes and
aftermath of the Marawi siege to a black-and-white issue, the
government would likely fail to address the Muslims’ future in
nation building, as previous administrations lacked foresight and
cutting-edge policies.

Marawi story
still unfolding


Duterte
pays tribute to soldiers who fought in Marawi Laguindingan Airport in
Cagayan de Oro City Oct. 20, 2017. Malacañang photo by Ace Morandante.

The
narrative of how the Marawi conflict came into fruition remains as
incomplete as are the many unanswered questions. For example, how
does one draw links and connect dots from place to place (rebel
strongholds) and people to people (rebel leaders) before the plot to
take over Marawi was hatched? Is it the clandestine movement of
foreign terrorists vis-à-vis the local rebel movement that spelled a
change in the trajectory of the Muslim insurgency? Mapping out the
links and alliances would be as tough and arduous as unspooling the
threads binding the clans and family loyalties, not to mention their
place as dynastic families in the sphere of local governance. But it
was certainly the call to violence over the years, the inability to
stop it at all cost, that made the southern enclaves of the Muslim
Mindanao an open field.


In
early 2019, roughly two years after the Marawi siege began, a new
Bangsamoro authority was put in place for a regional election in the
near future for a new autonomous government. It is imperative that
it forges ahead in its map to define a resurgence of Muslim pride and
demand equality among Filipinos; to reel back would no doubt bring
Mindanao into a spiral deeper in violence, serving yet again the
ingredients for another Marawi crisis in the making.