It was classic bravado from the Philippines’s tough-guy president, Rodrigo Duterte.
The Maute Group, a militant Islamic band fighting government troops near the southern Philippines city of Marawi last year, had asked for a cease-fire.
The President rejected the overture.
“They said that they will go down upon Marawi to burn the place,” Duterte recounted last December. “And I said, ‘Go ahead, do it.’”
He got his wish.
Hundreds of militants belonging to the Maute Group and its allies fighting under the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), seized Marawi three weeks ago, leading to a battle with the Philippine armed forces and the biggest test yet of Duterte’s leadership during his tumultuous first year in office.
A President who has focused on a deadly antidrug campaign that has claimed the lives of thousands of Filipinos seems to have been caught unprepared for a militant threat that has been festering in the south for years.
“The government has largely been in denial about the growth of ISIS and affiliated groups,” said Zachary M. Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington who specializes in Southeast Asian security issues. “Duterte has been preoccupied with his campaign of gutting the rule of law by using police and other security forces for the extrajudicial killing of drug pushers.”
Government forces have been unable to dislodge the militants despite deploying ground troops and bombing the city of 200,000 people from the air. More than 200 people have been killed, including 24 civilians, 58 soldiers and police officers, and at least 138 militants, according to the Philippine military.
Tens of thousands of civilians have fled, and much of the city center lies in ruins. The military says it has cleared 90 percent of the city but that militants remain in three neighborhoods in the center, where the militants are mixed in with hundreds of civilians.
Duterte has declared 60 days of martial law for the southern island of Mindanao, which includes Marawi and his hometown, Davao City. He has twice set deadlines for troops to retake Marawi, the country’s largest predominantly Muslim city, but each deadline has passed with the battle still raging.
On Friday Brig. Gen. Restituto Padilla predicted that the government would retake Marawi by Monday, Philippines Independence Day. On Saturday 13 Philippine marines were killed in a clash with militants there.
The militants’ seizure of the city, a bold attempt to establish an Islamic State (IS) caliphate in Southeast Asia, marks a significant advance for the Middle East-based terrorist group, as well as an apparent reordering of the militant threat in the southern Philippines.
For the first time, it puts the Philippines on the map with failed states, such as Libya and Afghanistan, as places where IS allies have sought to seize territory for a caliphate, giving the group another regional flash point in its effort to spread its influence globally.
The IS has urged fighters who cannot reach Syria to join the jihad in the Philippines instead, said Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict. Fighters from Indonesia, Malaysia, Chechnya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia were among those killed in the battle for Marawi.
Mindanao has long been a hotbed of insurgencies, with numerous armed groups operating outside government control. Until the siege at Marawi, the best-known internationally was Abu Sayyaf, an ostensibly Islamic militant group that specialized in kidnapping for ransom, turning Southeast Asia into the world’s piracy capital, edging out the Horn of Africa.
The Marawi siege also heralds the rise of Isnilon Hapilon, a longtime leader of Abu Sayyaf who had grown more ideologically minded over the years. Last year Hapilon, 51, was named by the IS as its emir in Southeast Asia. Previously based on the island of Basilan, he is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of most-wanted terrorists, and the United States has offered a $5-million reward for his capture.
Various factions have come together behind Hapilon, notably the Maute Group, led by the brothers Omar and Abdullah Maute. Educated in the Middle East, the Mautes are based in the Marawi area and recently accepted Hapilon’s leadership as emir.
The Mautes are believed responsible for bombing a market in Davao City last September that killed 15.
Duterte is the first president from Mindanao, and he ran last year as the candidate who could bring peace to the region. The bombing of his hometown may have inspired his angry challenge to the Mautes last December.
“It’s the usual Duterte brand of bravado,” said Roilo Golez, a former national security adviser to former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who left office in 2010. “It’s a way of intimidating the opposition. It works most of the time.”
It hasn’t with the Islamic in Mindanao.
After a clash between his military and Abu Sayyaf in April, Duterte suggested that the way to stop the militants was to eat them. “Make me mad,” he taunted. “Get me a terrorist. Give me salt and vinegar. I will eat his liver.”
In May the Philippine military got a tip that Hapilon had arrived in Marawi to join up with the Maute brothers. When soldiers raided the house where Hapilon was believed to be, hoping to capture him and claim the $5-million reward, they were surprised to find dozens of well-armed militants arrayed against them.
A video later recovered by the military and published by The Associated Press shows the militant leaders plotting their takeover of Marawi days before the military learned of Hapilon’s presence there. Hundreds of fighters who had gathered in preparation for seizing the city quickly put their plan into effect, burning schools and churches, taking hostages and taking over central Marawi.
Duterte’s declaration of martial law helped lead to the capture of Cayamora Maute, the father of the Maute brothers, along with other family members last Tuesday at a military checkpoint in Davao City. Some fear that the temporary martial law order in Mindanao could be expanded nationwide, an idea Duterte has openly toyed with so that he could use the military in his antidrug campaign.
“There is a sense of dread and fear that this will build support for martial law,” said Richard Javad Heydarian, a political analyst and author of the forthcoming book Duterte’s Rise. “This could strengthen the feeling of isolation by the Muslim minority.”
Muslims make up only about 5 percent of the country’s population overall but a larger proportion, estimated at 20 percent to 40 percent, on Mindanao.
Historic grievances among the Muslim Moro people there, widespread poverty and large lawless areas have helped create an opportunity for the IS. A peace process pursued by Duterte’s predecessor, President Benigno S. Aquino III, faltered in 2015 and has remained deadlocked under Duterte.
“It was not the spread of ISIS in Iraq and Syria that fueled ISIS cells in the Philippines, but the collapse of the peace process,” said Abuza, the National War College professor.
The growing threat in the South will most likely compel Duterte to improve his relations with the United States, a process that had already begun with the election of President Donald J. Trump.
Duterte has raged against the US for daring to criticize his antidrug campaign and, when President Barack Obama was in office, called for a “separation” from Washington. But Trump has shown a willingness to overlook the killings and has praised Duterte for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem”.
Leaders of the Philippines armed forces prevailed on Duterte not to reduce military cooperation, including a long-standing US program to provide training, equipment and intelligence to fight terrorism. Since 2001, the US has maintained a rotating force of 50 to 100 troops in the southern Philippines to combat Abu Sayyaf.
Last Sunday, Duterte said he never asked the US for help in Marawi, and it was a surprise to him when US Special Forces arrived to assist the Philippine military.
The US Embassy said last Friday that US personnel were helping as part of a military relationship with the Philippines that “remains robust and multifaceted”. Emma Nagy, a spokesman for the embassy in Manila, said, “US Special Forces have been providing support and assistance in the southern Philippines for many years, at the request of several different Filipino administrations.”
Whether the military can retake Marawi by its new deadline, the rebellion in the South is far from over. The audacity of the rebel takeover, even if it ultimately fails, will probably draw recruits from across the region, including members of other Islamist groups still disaffected and dissatisfied with a moribund peace process.
“If Duterte doesn’t deal with that, then this whole problem is going to fester for a very long time,” Abuza said. The “ungoverned space” on Mindanao, he said, “is a regional security threat, not just a Philippine security threat.”
Image credits: AP