The long war
Around Independence Day last month, when the violence in Marawi was entering its third week, the military said that 138 of the terrorists that attacked the city had been killed, and that the possibly hundreds remaining and fighting street by street and house to house with government troops now occupied merely 10 percent of the area.
The military had begun the shelling and airstrikes by then. The overall strife had driven most of the city’s 200,000 residents fleeing to neighboring provinces. Marawi, once a jewel of an Islamic city and a model community of harmony between its Muslim and Christian residents, was well on its way to becoming a burnt-out, devastated shell of itself.
But the military’s report that the terrorists were now contained in only a small part of the city proper and were under relentless assault was heartening. Surely the war would be over in a few days, and the tremendous task of rehabilitating Marawi — as well as drawing lessons from the stunning new scenario of terrorism it presented — could begin?
Those optimistic hours now appear quite premature and a small lifetime ago, as the war rages on into its seventh week, or nearly one and a half months since the armed invaders bearing the black flag of the terrorist entity Islamic State rampaged through Marawi’s streets on May 23. How has it managed to last this long?
The scale and surprise element of the attack was initially what was stunning. Solicitor General Jose Calida has admitted to the Supreme Court — which is hearing petitions on the legality of the martial law that President Duterte imposed on the whole of Mindanao in the wake of the attack — that the government had advance intelligence of the Maute plot. Still, the lightning siege of Marawi appeared to have caught the military off-guard. More disturbingly, reports that the terrorists included not only local men but also fighters from Malaysia, Indonesia, even Chechnya, dramatically expanded the implications of this development.
Mindanao has suffered intermittent fighting for decades as various separatist groups battled the government, and sometimes each other, for greater autonomy for the region. But this appears to be the first time that an armed group — one relatively new and unknown, and with foreign fighters in its midst — has held on to a Philippine city and sustained a firefight this long.
The Zamboanga siege in September 2013 — sparked by a faction of Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front erupting in violence in protest against the then-imminent peace agreement
between the Aquino administration and its
rival rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front — ended after about three weeks of fighting, with Misuari on the run and the rebels routed. But that clash also drove 100,000 Zamboanga residents away from their homes; a number of them still live in evacuation centers or remain unable to go home to their communities until now.
The distressingly long war in Marawi could mean, first of all, a greater toll for the hundreds of thousands of evacuees who must endure a longer period of displacement and constrained conditions in temporary shelters before they can be eventually allowed to return to their homes. Also, the death count continues to rise — 82 soldiers and policemen, 44 civilians, and 303 terrorists so far, according to the latest military figures.
The Armed Forces chief, Gen. Eduardo Año, has promised “one decisive major battle” that would finally knock out the terrorists and wipe them off Marawi for good. The fighters are now said to be pinned down to only a square-kilometer patch of the city, though they still reportedly number a little over 100, along with an undetermined number of civilian captives they are using as human shields.
Seven weeks and counting. Every day, the nation wakes up fervently hoping that this harrowing nightmare is finally at an end.
