Book Review: "The Battle of Marawi" Reveals the AFP is an Inept and Ill-prepared Military Force

The Battle of Marawi by journalist Criselda Yabes is an exciting look into the operations of the Marawi siege and the men who led them. We all know the story. ISIS militants laid siege to the city of Marawi and the AFP took it back five months later. Criselda's book fills in the gaps and gives us a fuller picture of just how the battle was fought and won. There is a lot of information here. Certainly too much to cover in a review. As she writes, "Marawi was not a one-dimensional war."

To purchase visit: https://www.facebook.com/thebattleofmarawi

While the book is largely composed of personal stories from the perspective of those on the ground Yabes also paints a deeply disturbing portrait of the AFP as an inept and ill-prepared military force which could have prevented the siege yet chose to ignore or downplay vital intelligence. Individually there is much bravery and courage among the soldiers but collectively there is much that is wanting. This book underscores the necessity of a Senate investigation into the lead up and events of the Marawi siege.

In my previous blog post and video titled "Intelligence Failures and Prior Knowledge of the Marawi Siege" I included an interview with DND Secretary Lacson where he claimed that they had a man inside the Maute Group. Yabes shines a light on this man whose code name was Jericho. He was very close to discovering what the Maute Group was planning but he was found out and rubbed out. She writes:

Jericho was going to put all the links together. He was going to how far into the terrorist cell the Maute brothers were, beyond their family relations with the leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The intelligence headquarters in Manila didn't give much credence to the threat of the brothers, thinking that the guys in the field might be drawing conclusions from their imagination. Jericho had it so close and he told his classmates about it, that there's another one on the way to creating havoc. His death should have alerted the ground commanders: a warning bell of things to come.

p. 40

If the AFP ignored what intel this man had to offer then why did Lacson even mention him as if he had provided any information that the AFP actually used to prepare for the imminent siege?

Reading this book one is left wondering why the AFP announced that the siege would be over quickly by June 12th, Independence Day. When Zamboanga was under siege in 2013 it took 20 days to recapture the city from the MNLF. Marawi is much larger than Zamboanga and the number of terrorists as well as the city itself was a complete unknown to commanders on the ground. They literally were in the dark as to the reality of the situation yet Duterte was told on May 26th that it could all be over in 3-4 days!

The President arrived on May 26, first landing at the mechanized brigade camp in Ditucalan. The briefing was "generic," in the sense that nothing was clear. How long will this last? Previous experience will tell us that it could be over in three or four days, Com1 told the commander-in-chief. Everyone thought so too and they were all wrong. Whatever you need, just let me know, said the President.

p. 120

Exactly what previous experience was that assessment based on? Zamboanga should have been both a a wake up call to the AFP and an event to learn from but according to Yabes reports from Zamboanga collected dust on the shelves and any lessons that could be learned were missed.

The aftermath of the Zamboanga experience went into a compilation of reports given to general headquarters to digest and learn lessons from, especially when it came to improving capability. But like most things, the reports gathered dust on the shelves, and here they were again. The LRR (Light Reaction Regiment) was trained in precise urban combat, namely those that involved raids, hostage taking incidents, or putting down a lone wolf. Zamboanga taught them the need for extra manpower, recommending the use of infantry, for example, when the situation would get out of hand in a larger urban center that had civilian lives at risk. None of the infantry units was trained for such an eventuality.

p. 40-41

Yabes does not tell us exactly why the infantry was not trained properly but this paragraph is in line with what DND Secretary Lorenzana said about the AFP stopping training for urban warfare because they did not use the skill.

"It's a skill we used to have but we lost along the way because we didn't use it. We keep training our people in what we call the military operations in urban terrain, MOUT.  But we seldom use it, we never use it, so we stopped teaching our people at the Marawi camp. So now we have to reacquire that skill plus the necessary equipment that goes with it.

https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2018/06/martial-law-no-ready-reserve-ammunition.html

She also documents petty infighting between the various branches of the AFP. Instead of working together toward a common goal the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force were sometimes more concerned about their pride. Take the instance of one Air Force commander who ignored the requests of an Army commander to drop bombs until he was issued an apology for being shouted at.

Butler carried on with the immense duty of being the liaison, dispatching flights, choosing options, sometimes second guessing commanders. And sometimes, it felt as though he was the commanding general of the Air Force. Charlie got used to having him around, sige, alam mo na 'yan.  You know what to do.  

One of the battalion commanders gave him hell for delaying a flight when his troops were waiting for the bomb drop. Butler had to pull his phone away from his ears as the barrage of invectives came through; in retaliation he ignored the commander's bomb run requests in his sector for about a week until an apology was offered in a long and winding text message.

p 108

Could it be that petty actions like this are what prolonged the war? Was Butler ever reprimanded for his actions? There should be cooperation between each branch of the military but Yabes says this is not the norm and Marawi was a first where such cooperation was necessary.

Marawi was the first of many things. Here. the military learned the hard way that they had to come together for a "joint-ness" in their operation, an exercise they should have done previously and rarely did so for a number of reasons: lack of planning, lack of will that was bent on politics. As in the past, the battle was again an example of reacting to a visible threat that caught them by surprise, rather then preventing and nipping it in the bud. 

p. 216

With such a lack of coordination and cooperation among the branches of the AFP is it any wonder that the Islamic and communist insurgencies have been ongoing for 50 years with no end in sight?

But truly the most damning thing of all that Yabes writes is that the AFP lied in their reports about what happened in Marawi.

When I began writing the first draft of this book in July 2019, I knew I had more than enough to go by and yet, I could have also carried on searching for other lower-ranking officers down to the corporals and the privates who were at the frontlines. Every target, every objective, every major incident in the battle area was worth a book in itself. I wish the Armed Forces wold invest in such an undertaking without self-censorship, to have a better understanding of what went right or wrong. Each unit has an After-Review Report, as officially required, but in some cases it didn’t always match with the truth (how boldly they could defy their seniors!) For the first time in covering a major military event, I had to take detours at length and dig elsewhere for more accuracy. One officer joked that it would take me ten years to get to the bottom of everything. 

Notes From the Author

Such an accusation is a bombshell and only underscores the absolute need for a Senate-formed Marawi Commission to investigate what happened in the lead up to and during the siege. Yabes does not tell the reader what exactly the AFP lied about in those reports but a reasonable guess can be made that they lied about what happened while clearing building 1010.

This incident happened at the very end of the siege and was in fact the last operation of the entire battle. What happened? Yabes is not clear and that is no fault of her own because the men she interviewed were very reluctant to talk about it. Basically hostages and terrorists who had surrendered were being prepared to be taken out of the building when all of a sudden a rebel on the rooftop started spraying machine gun fire. In the resulting chaos all of the surrendering terrorists were slaughtered in an act of vengeance.

Tell me what happened in Ten-Ten, I ask him. 

He muttered the worthlessness of the human security act, a toothless law that the military says made it difficult for them to keep terrorists behind bars. The rebels who fought them will be the same rebels they will have to fight again in the future - that was how they judged their dilemma. The law might take too many long turns before justice was meted out.

p. 202

No you don't understand, I was told when I made the rounds asking some officers about this particular incident. If you had been there for five months, you would have done the same, you would have wanted them dead if you had seen what they did to our men. You don't know what it's like to see bodies of soldiers burnt and mutilated, to watch comrades die, to feel the loss and pain of wounds. 

p. 203

And how did senior commanders respond to this incident? By covering it up and asking television reporters who had video of the incident to not report it!

When senior commanders radioed to inquire what went on, the response was, tapos na. It's over. The deed was done. What did that mean, exactly? There was no sanction from the seniors; apparently it had spiraled out of control. There was a breakdown in discipline. WestMinCom privately asked a couple of television reporters, who managed to obtain snippets of other footage showing the gang-style thrashing, to withhold airing them. These were the videos, one text message said from one senior commander to another, "dat wud destroy the gud image we had worked so hard in Liberating Marawi." 

p. 202

AFP soldiers callously massacred surrendering rebels and the top brass covered it up. Which television reporters acquiesced to their requests to participate in that cover-up? Those reporters are also complicit.

There must be a Senate investigation into the Marawi Siege. People have to be held accountable.    Three years is far too long already. Does no one in the Senate care about the security of the nation that they continue to let this devastating terrorist act go unexamined?  Maybe Yabes' book will finally bring about such an investigation into reality. As for now this is the closest we can get to a definitive account of what happened in Marawi.