Friendly fire

As of Thursday, 171 people have died in the fighting in Marawi City — 19 of them civilians and 32 government forces. Of those soldiers who perished in battle, 11 carry an additional tinge of tragedy due to the unfortunate circumstances of their death. They were not hit in a fire fight with the enemy; it was a wayward bomb intended for the bandits and terrorists holed up nearby that killed them, and wounded seven others. A military investigation is now underway to look into the mishap.

“It’s very sad to be hitting our own troops,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said. “There must be a mistake somewhere, either someone directing from the ground, or the pilot.”

The incident complicates the already thorny nature of the relentless air strikes that the government has ordered against the bandits and terrorists. Some 218,665 people have been displaced by the strife as of May 31, according to the Humanitarian and Emergency Response Team of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. The Red Cross adds that about 3,700 residents are still trapped in Marawi, unable to leave their hiding places as sporadic gun battles continue in the streets between government forces and the terrorists. The latter’s position is located in a dense area of the city, said Lorenzana, making it hard for the military to hit targets with artillery.

In the “friendly fire” incident that involved 11 soldiers, the Maute and Army groups were reportedly hunkered down near each other in close-range combat in a cluster of buildings and houses. The aircraft that dropped the wayward bomb had earlier made three successful air strikes in the area, only for the fourth one to miss and hit the troops. The jets were using conventional bombs, not the precision bombs that the military had earlier said would make for “surgical” air strikes that would not result in large-scale damage to Marawi and its trapped residents.

The military has announced that the aircraft and its pilots are now grounded pending formal investigation of the incident. “It was very unfortunate and no one wanted it to happen,” said Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Eduardo Año.

Indeed, it must be heart-wrenching for the families of the soldiers to learn that their loved ones died, not in a heroic battle with the enemies of the nation — the singular task for which they had trained and dedicated their lives — but from a random mistake by someone on the same side. “Friendly fire” is an innocuously phrased but cruel-sounding euphemism for such incidents; friends and comrades on the battlefield are not supposed to end up killing each other, and the accidental nature of such circumstances, in the frantic heat of the moment when a soldier’s split-second decisions may mean life or death, makes for a particularly harrowing kind of tragedy. The bombers and air controllers who made the apparent mistake that felled their comrades on the ground must also be in enormous pain over this accident—a deeply saddening event all around.

The violence in Marawi is in its second week. Clouds of dark smoke periodically rise to indicate the intensity of the conflict. Public support for the fight against the bandits and terrorists is palpable, though also tempered by fears that the fierce air strikes being done will eventually hit noncombatants and friendly forces, or flatten Marawi and leave its residents returning to rubble once the dust clears.

There should be no question that the military must accomplish its mission of freeing the city and the rest of Mindanao from the bandits and terrorists; that’s what the island-wide martial law declaration is for, according to Malacañang, despite the fighting being currently limited to Marawi. But as the swells of displaced Filipinos streaming into Iligan, Cagayan de Oro and other places grow by the hour, and the fighting goes on without letup, more trying days are ahead. We need to steel our souls, and reach out to help.