Two months after Islamic militants launched an assault on one of the biggest southern cities in the Philippines, the fighting is dragging on, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte says he is prepared to wait a year for it to end.
The defense top brass admits it underestimated its enemy and is struggling to finish off the highly organized, pro-Islamic State (IS) fighters who swept through Marawi City on May 23 and have held parts of it despite sustained ground attacks by hundreds of soldiers and daily pummeling by planes and artillery.
Lawmakers on Saturday approved Duterte’s request to extend martial law to the end of the year on the island of Mindanao, granting greater powers to security forces to go after extremists with a reach that goes far beyond Marawi.
Photo: AFP
However, it remains unclear how exactly Duterte plans to tackle extremism after troops retake Marawi, where about 70 militants remain holed up in the debris of what was once a flourishing commercial district, along with many civilian hostages.
More than 500 people have been killed, including 45 civilians and 105 government troops. After missing several self-imposed deadlines to retake the city, the military says its options are limited because of the hostages.
“I told them ‘do not attack.’ What’s important is we do not want to kill people,” Duterte said on Friday. “If we have to wait there for one year, let us wait for one year.”
Philippine Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana on Saturday said that after Marawi, the government would strengthen surveillance in the region, widening the net to detect rebel training camps and movements of militants.
“We need communications equipment, high-tech communications equipment that we can use to monitor cellphones of the enemies. We also need drones,” he told the Philippine Congress.
Security experts say the government needs a strategic overhaul after failing to act on warnings long ago that radical ideology was taking hold in Mindanao and luring foreign fighters unable to join IS in Syria and Iraq.
“Things have changed dramatically... Our country must pursue some paradigm shifts,” analyst and retired police intelligence officer Rodolfo Mendoza said. “We have to counter the spread of terrorism not only by supporting use of intelligence or counter-intelligence, but tackling the root causes.”
The Marawi fighting has been much publicized across militant networks and experts say it could attract more fighters to the region.
“It has inspired young extremists from around the region to want to join,” the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict said on Friday in a report, adding the fighting had “lifted the prestige of the Philippine fighters in the eyes of [IS] central.”
Richard Javad Heydarian, a political science professor at Manila’s De La Salle University, said the military should seek to neutralize the Maute brothers who planned and executed the assault to buy time to disrupt recruitment and stop fighters from regrouping.
Moderate separatist groups from Mindanao should be co-opted to counter the extremist message, he said, while the military should work closer with the US and Australia, which have provided operational advice and surveillance planes.
The Marawi crisis erupted not because of intelligence failures, but the policy priorities of Duterte, Heydarian added.
He said that Duterte has channeled security resources into a war on drugs instead of countering Islamic radicalization in the south, an issue the president himself has flagged in the past.
“They were all aware of this. It was just a matter of time,” Heydarian said.
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