By Martin Petty

MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – Prayer mats, chequered scarves, black fatigues, and bullet-ridden walls mark the hideout where the “emir” of Islamic State in Southeast Asia spent months preparing the most brazen and devastating militant attack in the region.

A four-storey house in a quiet alley of Marawi City in the southern Philippines was the secret lair of Isnilon Hapilon until late May. After a botched military raid to apprehend him, a thousand-strong rebel alliance held large parts of the city for five months.

Hapilon’s death in a military operation elsewhere in Marawi on Oct. 16 was the catalyst for the end of Philippines’ longest and most intense urban battle in recent history. [L4N1MY257]

Security forces moved in on the house on May 23, trying to capture the country’s most wanted man, but came under sustained attack from rebels firing rocket-propelled grenades.

A bomb-battered structure, shattered windows and wall-to-wall holes from machine gun fire tell the story of the ferocious three-day battle that erupted at Hapilon’s hideout, and prompted the call to hundreds of fighters to expedite the planned takeover of Marawi.

Hapilon escaped through a large hole that was blasted out of a rear wall, making his way across a rice field to a mosque next to the vast Lake Lanao. From there, he joined the guerrillas who held the heart of the city for the next five months.

Community volunteers on Thursday showed Reuters the house in the now empty, narrow street where the military believes Hapilon had lain low for several months. All other properties were intact and neighbors had fled long ago.

“At the time, no one knew who these people were, people saw them about but there was no reason to suspect anything,” said Mohammed Seddick Raki, who lived nearby.

Other volunteers said women and children stayed at the rented house and visitors were frequent.

Children’s’ shoes were scattered amid the debris and a woman’s robe was hanging from a window.

BATTLE READY

Inside the house, black shirts, pants and plaid scarves synonymous with Islamic State were strewn across rooms littered with broken floor tiles and chunks of rock from blasted walls.

Left behind were waterproof boots, a balaclava, medical supplies and camouflage bags and waistcoats typically used by soldiers to carry rifle magazines.

Coated in a think layer of dust on floors of every room were pocket-sized copies of the Koran, some with pages stained by water leaked through gaping holes in the roof.

The deputy task force commander in Marawi, Colonel Romeo Brawner, said Hapilon evaded security forces because rebels had a network of lookouts and gunmen ready to defend him.

“They put up heavy resistance, they were spread across a large area. They were strategically placed,” he said. “They were prepared for it.”

Hapilon’s escape in the last week of May led to anarchy in the city of about 200,000. Rebels took hostages, set fire to buildings, ransacked churches, broke into the local jail to free inmates and looted an armory.

The government had insufficient security forces in Marawi to prevent the fighters from fanning out across the city and seizing hundreds of buildings.

Hapilon was wanted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and had a bounty on his head of up to $5 million. He was killed by army rangers in a night operation and his body was retrieved from the battle zone in the heart of the city and his identity confirmed by the FBI’s DNA analysis.

In five months of intense urban battle, the heart of Marawi was all but destroyed by government air strikes and shelling that leveled commercial areas and crushed thousands of shops, homes and vehicles.

“No one could have known what would happen,” said Mohamed Faisal Mama, a resident in the same Basak Malutlot district where Hapilon was hiding.

“No one knew them. They weren’t famous then.”

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – After five months of crippling conflict, there are slow signs of life returning in the Philippines’ battered Marawi City.

Utilities engineers were at work on Thursday in the near-deserted outskirts of Marawi which escaped the daily air strikes that flattened vast swathes of the city.

A few groceries, motorcycle repair shops and gasoline sellers have opened, ready for the first batch of returning residents in the coming days.

Nearly 6,500 families will be headed back to the homes that were left intact, out of the 353,000 people displaced when hundreds of pro-Islamic State gunmen ran amok and seized control of central Marawi in May.

Combat operations ended on Monday, when the last fighters were killed in a fierce final stand. With vehicles crushed and overturned and buildings reduced to skeletons of mangled steel and rubble, the city appears to be in the aftermath of a war that lasted years, rather than months.

Amelah Ampaso said she decided that day to sneak back to Marawi and reopen her shop, now stocked with cooking oil and cigarettes and offering photocopying services, printing, and haircuts.

As a first-mover in a liberated Marawi, the 25-year-old is doing brisk business among the few people around.

“The other shops are closed, so people are coming here,” she said. “It’s safe again.”

But nearby streets look like the set of a post-apocalyptic film, silent, with shutters pulled down and weeds growing between concrete slabs. Rust and decay is setting in after months of heavy rains and neglect.

Spray painted on the walls of almost every building is the word “clear”, marking where police and soldiers went house-to-house checking thousands of abandoned properties for booby-traps or signs of insurgents hiding.

The fighting has taken a heavy toll, killing more than 1,100 people, mostly militants, and reducing a large part of the interior of the city to piles of rubble, leaving only shells of uninhabitable gray buildings.

Shop owner Madid Noor, 64, returned two months into the battle, reassured by detachments of soldiers and police nearby, and unperturbed by what were constant explosions and the howling of fighter jets over the city.

After a few lean months, he hopes returnees will come to him to buy washing powder, petrol and fake branded sportswear.

“Some days we have customers. But not every day,” he said.

(Reporting by Martin Petty; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

By Martin Petty

MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – With vehicles crushed and overturned and buildings reduced to skeletons of mangled steel and rubble, the Philippine city of Marawi resembles the aftermath of a war that lasted years, rather than months.

Except for small clusters of troops dotted amid the ruins and skinny cats and dogs scavenging for food, the heart of Marawi is a ghost town, all but destroyed by the Philippines’ biggest and fiercest urban battle in recent history.

Hundreds of rebels claiming allegiance to Islamic State seized large areas of the city of 200,000 people in May and clung on through unrelenting government air strikes and artillery bombardments, right until the last remaining gunmen were killed three days ago.

The military escorted media on Wednesday through the ravaged streets of the once picturesque lakeside town, showing for the first time the front lines of a devastating conflict that has stoked fears of Islamic State’s extremist agenda taking root in the region.

The scale of the damage was stark as a convoy of vans carrying reporters and cameramen followed an army truck through one district after another, stopping off at key intersections recently cleared of unexploded munitions and booby traps.

Wide boulevards in the city were lined by crumbling homes and shop fronts missing higher floors, with fragments of chairs, children’s toys and household appliances wedged into piles of crumbled concrete.

Tattered pieces of clothing poking above banks of rubble provided the only color in the mass of gutted grey buildings blackened by smoke. Vans, pickup trucks and cars were turned over, coated in rust or torn apart by bomb blasts.

The militants’ planning, stockpiling of weapons and their combat capability stunned government forces, who had to fight street by street to take back the city and were often pinned down by snipers and homemade bombs.

“At first our forces cannot press them, they moved from one building to the next. Our concept was to restrict them – it took time, but we constricted them,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yunque, a special forces commander deployed in Marawi since the beginning of the conflict.

“We innovated to suppress their techniques. They were not better than us, that’s why they lost.”

RUINS OF WAR

The Philippines announced the end of combat operations in Marawi City on Monday after troops killed 42 remaining militants, including some foreign fighters. More than 1,100 people, including 165 troops and 45 civilians, died in the conflict. The government has said the rest were militants.

Senior officers said they took pains to protect the multitude of mosques in what is the only designated Islamic City in the mainly Catholic Philippines. Although many escaped the pounding of daily air strikes, domes and walls were peppered with holes from heavy machine gun fire as troops sought to flush out rebels hiding within.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis praised Filipino soldiers for defeating the militants without attracting allegations of human rights violations.

The United States provided critical tactical intelligence in the Marawi combat operation, deploying surveillance planes and drones, thermal imaging and eavesdropping equipment.

The walls were blasted away at Marawi’s police headquarters where the armory was looted, and in the adjacent jail where more than 100 prisoners were freed.

Close by, a mosque minaret had fallen into a mash of metal and rock. Behind it was a lone, leafless tree with only a few branches left.

The militants smashed through thick layers of concrete to turn drainage channels into trenches, doubling as tunnels for fighters to move between buildings and elude surveillance drones and army snipers.

Rebel-held buildings were covered with graffiti, including one of an arrow through a heart, with the message “I love ISIS”, an acronym for Islamic State.

But there was no love for the rebel alliance among the hundreds of jubilant soldiers at send-off ceremonies held this week as troops gradually return home.

Colonel Corleto Vinluan, the commander of joint special operations, described the enemy as “rats”.

He said the military had gained valuable experience in urban combat and chose a strategy that took time, but ultimately paid off.

“We couldn’t just enter the area, it was very big, we did not know where the leaders were, we had to surround them and the area became smaller. It was that time when we really took control,” Vinluan told Reuters.

“We didn’t expect they’ll last that long, their ammunition their firearms and their food. We learned a lot from this event, we adjusted our strategies.

“They were tough fighters, some of them, but not all.”

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)