MARAWI, Philippines (AFP) – At first glance, the endless rows of devastated buildings looked like they were destroyed by a great earthquake. But the punctured, bullet-riddled walls tell the true story of what is now considered the Philippines’ longest urban war.
“No one wanted this to happen,’’ President Duterte said on Tuesday as he declared Marawi city “liberated from the terrorists’ influence.’’
A day earlier, troops tracked and killed the Islamic State “emir’’ for Southeast Asia, Isnilon Hapilon.
The five-month battle for the southern city, the Islamic capital of mainly Catholic Philippines, lasted four times longer than the US-led campaign to liberate Manila from Japanese occupying forces in World War II.
In the process the military literally destroyed Marawi to save it from militants it said were intent on carving it into a Southeast Asian caliphate.
An AFP team saw metal shutters and walls pockmarked with bullet holes, pavements piled with twisted metal and cannibalised cars, and streets strewn with machine-gun slugs.
The scene evoked pictures of destruction as seen in war-torn Middle Eastern cities like Aleppo and Mosul.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana estimated the government will need $1.1 billion to rebuild the city.
On the ground floor of some buildings, soldiers peered warily at the street through holes big enough for men to crawl through.
These gaps are evidence the militants who seized the city on May 23, then estimated by military officials to have numbered one thousand, brought in a new style of urban warfare that initially flummoxed Filipino troops.
The militants blasted rat holes through walls to turn hundreds of densely-built buildings in the city centre into a maze of improvised tunnels to evade relentless air strikes as well as US and Australian spy planes and drones.
They seized hostages, using some as human shields and others as cooks, medics, or gravediggers.
They also forced captives to loot houses for cash and weapons and sometimes, to fight alongside them, the military said.
“These terrorists are using combat tactics that we’ve seen in the Middle East,’’ US Pacific Command chief Admiral Harry Harris told a security forum in Singapore on Tuesday.
It also marked the first time an IS-inspired force had banded together to fight on such a scale in the region, he added.
The Philippine military and police lost 164 men, with more than a thousand soldiers wounded in house-to-house combat.
Most were hit by improvised explosive devices, snipers and firebombs, as well as shoulder-fired rockets.
Forty-seven civilians were killed during the hostilities, while nearly 400,000 others fled their homes, according to official tallies.
Following his speech in Marawi, Duterte apologised to the region’s displaced residents. “We did not wish this on you… but the circumstances really compelled us to act,’’ he said in the eastern city of Pili.
The authorities said they believed the terrorists, some of them foreign fighters from nearby Malaysia, Indonesia and Chechnya, stockpiled weapons and food for weeks and possibly months before seizing the city.
The militants also turned mosques, which were off-limits to air strikes and artillery, into sniper nests or munitions depots, authorities said.
“At the start we were surprised because we were used to fighting in the mountains and areas away from population centres,’’ Philippine military chief General Eduardo Año told Radyo Singko radio station in Manila on Wednesday.
The troops gradually adapted to the enemy’s tactics while acquiring better-suited equipment, including sniper rifles and armored vehicles, he added.
Some 882 militants were killed, the military said, with fighting continuing Wednesday at a district near the shore of nearby Lanao lake.
Authorities have declined to give a timetable for the return of the displaced residents.