Insurgency: Marawi Folk Demand 'Whole Truth' About Siege

It's about time. After 5 years of the Senate sitting on their butts doing nothing the citizens of Marawi have finally called for an investigation into what happened before, during, and after the siege. 

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1601614/marawi-folk-demand-whole-truth-about-siege

Five years after the war that left Marawi City in ruins, leaders of civil society and families displaced in the siege by Islamic State (IS) terrorists were still demanding answers from the national government as to what exactly happened in the run-up to and during the five months of fighting that destroyed its main commercial center.

With the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte winding down without giving Maranaos the answers they sought, it would be up to presumptive President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. “to revisit “ the events that led to the Marawi siege and to “set the tone for starting things right,” said Saripada Pacasum Jr. of Marawi Reconstruction Conflict Watch.

Pacasum noted that in the past five years, people who have “untold stories” about the siege have been keeping information to themselves for fear of backlash, even as they have pictures and videos to back up their tales, which mainly showed that the terrorists’ takeover of the city could have been aborted, and of the massive looting that followed.

“All are afraid to talk,” Pacasum, who was Lanao del Sur’s disaster risk reduction and management officer during the siege, told the program Alerto Bangsamoro over DxMS radio in Cotabato City on Monday.

“We should have an avenue for this [airing out]. We don’t want for [people’s] pent-up anger to linger and … another siege to happen,” Pacasum explained.

It's funny that these people are only now finally asking for the truth especially when they knew exactly what was happening before it happened. In an an interview in 2018 ARMM assemblyman Zia Alonto Adiong admired that the people knew ISIS was in the area and something was brewing. 

"Well actually we already, all of the people in Marawi City, in the entire province, already knew that there was a group fashioning themselves after ISIS. We knew about the Maute brothers but it's like a phantom. They're like a phantom.  You know that there's a group but you don't actually know the individual members of this group. So it was more of a distant, say for example, you feel their presence but you don't actually know where they are. So that's why they're like phantom. They come and go and even before the Butig attack they were already harassing non-Marano residents in the city accordingly they even admitted to this hostilities, this harassment against non-Marano residents in the city. 

So it's more of like knowing them but not knowing exactly who are the members. That's why when they came out on the 23rd everyone was really surprised. Even in the family they never expected that one family member has actually joined the group. In our case, I give an example, there was this kid in our neighbourhood who used to go to our place because his mom used to do laundry for us and on the attack that's the only time that we learned that this kid of 14 years old was actually joined, has been a member of the Maute for several years since 2011. He was recruited in 2011."      

Like Bato's answer about not knowing the specific time of the attack, Adiong's answer about not knowing specially who are the individual members of the Maute group is irrelevant. Actually he contradicts himself when he says first, they were like a phantom and then they were harassing residents. Phantoms don't harass people. Whoever was being harassed saw these people face to face. The presence of Maute was known and if it was known by all of the people in Marawi City and the entire province then you can bet all the politicans also knew.

https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2018/05/intelligence-failures-and-prior.html 

Presidential Adviser to the Peace Process Jesus Dureza concurs on this matter and says that the citizens of Marawi knew what was going on.

"When martial law ... Marawi because many people were shocked, people from Marawi, even the Moro people. They never thought that they themselves wold become victims of violent extremists. They knew that many are members of their own clan.  They know them. They knew that they were moving firearms for a long time, they had been stockpiling up firearms. But when I asked the evacuees "Bakit di nyo sinabi yan?" (Why didn't you tell us?) "Sir, akala namin, kapwa Muslim hindi kami bibiktimahin" (We thought they would spare us because we are also Muslims).” 

https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2018/05/intelligence-failures-and-prior.html 

These people knew what was going on but declined to speak up because they thought they would be spared because they are also Muslims. As we all know now no one was spared.

Back to the article:

Maranao activist Drieza Lininding, chair of Moro Consensus Group, said setting the record straight about the siege was best done through a congressional inquiry.

Two years ago, Lininding had urged the Senate to undertake such a probe, especially after Sen. Panfilo Lacson said the siege could have been prevented had the country already had the Anti-Terrorism Law in place.

Lininding had blamed state security forces for failing to flex their muscles in time to prevent the siege as they already knew such intention by the brothers Abdullah and Omar Khayyam Maute. Three months before the war in Marawi, the Maute band had laid siege on Butig town, over 50 km away.

During the war, when government forces worked to flush out the terrorists from the city, displaced families took issue with the alleged looting of their houses.

What was highlighted in news reports were those done by IS militants. But Pacasum said that even in houses in so-called “safe zones,” which were supposedly under the control of the military and police, looting happened.

Books written about the siege, such as “The Battle of Marawi” by Criselda Yabes and “Marawi Siege: Stories from the Frontlines” by Carmela Fonbuena, mentioned incidents of looting.

“We cannot remain quiet with these issues,” Pacasum said on Monday, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the siege.

Two years ago this activist lobbied the Senate to investigate the siege and they did nothing! That's the "doing nothing" I meant in the opening sentence of this article. The only Senator who advocated investigating what happened was Trillanes and no one acted on his resolution.

https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/654354/trillanes-wants-senate-probe-on-why-how-marawi-siege-happened/story/

“There should be joint efforts between the Department of National Defense and other government agencies to assess the lessons, including lapses on the part of the government, why the battle between the government forces and the terrorists lasted for five months,” Trillanes said.

He said the government knew about the threat months before Maute-ISIS bandits attacked the city. Duterte, he said, even challenged the Maute group to burn Marawi.

An investigation into the deadliest terror attack in the nation should have been a no brainer but it seems these Senators have no brains. While they did investigate hazing not a finger was lifted to uncover the truth about Marawi.

Trillanes is absolutely correct that the government had prior knowledge of the siege. I compiled a video of officials admitting this fact. 

But from reading this article it seems the citizens of Marawi are more concerned about looting committed by government troops than they are about the causes of the siege. Sure looting happened and that is bad but there are worse things that happened. Author Criselda Yabes in her book about the siege relates that AFP troops massacred terrorists who had surrendered and the news crews accompanying them willingly covered this up!

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.

https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2020/09/book-review-battle-of-marawi-reveals.html 

Not only did this get covered up but the some soldiers filed false reports.

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. 

https://philippinefails.blogspot.com/2020/09/book-review-battle-of-marawi-reveals.html 

Everything about the Marawi siege from the lead up to the lingering aftermath is a real horror show. The people deserve answers. An investigation would expose gaps in the Philippines security apparatus which could be properly addressed. To not investigate is to be complicit in a cover-up. It's too late for the Duterte administration to carry out an investigation and it's far from likely that the incoming Marcos administration will care enough to launch one. For now the truth about the Marawi siege will have to lie buried.