Duterte urged: Deploy soldiers to prevent Maute rebel clashes in Lanao town

COTABATO CITY, Philippines - The Dawlah Islamiya in Butig, Lanao del Sur is just a ragtag militant gang but enjoys the support of local Islamic schools providing fanatical students to help fight government forces.

Local officials in Butig on Saturday urged President Rodrigo Duterte to assign a battalion of soldiers in the municipality to prevent Dawlah Islamiya militants, also known as the Maute terror group, from coming back to plunder villages.

Members of the Butig municipal peace and order council on Saturday told The STAR more than half of the group’s only about 200 members are jobless men from nearby towns and students of an Islamic school in Marawi City.

Lanao del Sur Vice Gov. Mamintal Adiong Jr., a senior member of the provincial peace and order council, told reporters, at the sideline of Thursday’s local government summit of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) in Davao City, that the school is now being monitored by local authorities.

Other local executives from Lanao del Sur who attended the summit said they want the Department of Education-ARMM to look into the activities of the Islamic school, whose name they asked not to publish yet pending the outcome of a full-dressed probe on its alleged links with the Dawlah Islamiya.

“There are also three other smaller Islamic schools rumored to have links with this group which is espousing violence. Nowhere in the Qur’an can we find a single verse espousing violence as a means of furthering a cause or in seeking redress,” said a mayor. 

Maranaw mayors confirmed that the suspicious school in Marawi City first sent students to Butig to help the Dawlah Islamiya fight Army units that flushed them out of the municipality during the campaign period that preceded the May 9, 2016 elections.

“Certain students of the school were reportedly absent from classes during the latest incursion of the group in populated areas in Butig,” said a local official present in the ARMM local government summit, held at the SMX Convention Center in Davao City.

Duterte was keynote speaker in the gathering, which culminated Thursday afternoon.

Mayors are worried of more clandestine attacks soon by militants on Maranaw peasant communities to avenge the deaths of 22 Dawlah Islamiya gunmen soldiers killed in a spate of encounters there last week that displaced 2,715 Maranaw families.

The military had announced that more than 50 Dawlah Islamiya members were killed in firefights in Butig from November 23 to 25. Local executives confirmed that the group only had 22 fatalities, nine of them adolescents.

Now in his second term as ARMM’s regional vice governor, Lucman, who hails from Bayang town in Lanao del Sur, said there is a need for an immediate deployment of a battalion of soldiers in Butig to deter attacks by the Dawlah Islamiya.

“An Army battalion that would stay there and not leave after the ongoing anti-Maute operations,” Lucman said.

Evacuees provided with food by the ARMM government through a team led by Lucman, concurrent regional social welfare secretary, shared saddening stories on how militants forced them last week to leave at gunpoint and looted their houses.

The evacuees said the militants also took away their farm animals as they fled to elude responding soldiers.

“It is just a very small group. Most of its members are not residents of Butig but are from nearby towns in Lanao del Sur,” said Abdul Pansar, the municipal planning and development coordinator of Butig.

The Dawlah Islamiya, founded by relatives Omar and Abdullah Maute, boasts of its allegiance to the Independent State of Iraq and Syria and has also been using the black ISIS flag as its revolutionary banner.

The founders of the group had studied Islamic theology in Syria, Jordan and in secular schools in the United Arab Emirates, according to incumbent public officials in Lanao del Sur.

Last week’s hostilities in Butig erupted when Dawlah Islamiya gunmen showed force in the center of the municipality and hoisted the ISIS flag on strategic spots there as if taunting local authorities.

“Maybe they were only after of media mileage. They all ran away after a series of encounters with soldiers that came to clear from their occupation the areas they occupied for about two days,” said a provincial official.

Mayors in Maguindanao’s adjoining Matanog, Buldon and Barira towns that are all located near the forested border of the province with Lanao del Sur said they are apprehensive of a possible retreat of the Dawlah Islamiya militants in Butig to their municipalities.

Buldon Mayor Abolais Manalao has recommended an urgent meeting of the municipal peace and order councils in the three Maguindanao towns to discuss how to prevent the possible influx of extremists from Butig.

Butig is so close to the border of Lanao del Sur and Maguindanao, where there is a much bigger militant group, the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, also known for its allegiance to ISIS.

“We have to involve the moderate Muslim religious leaders in our towns in addressing this issue,” Manalao said in Filipino.

Butig Mayor Dimnatang Pansar said he is optimistic Malacañang will deploy soon a battalion of soldiers in their municipality to help the local police curb the activities of the Dawlah Islamiya.

There are only 20 policemen in Butig, some of them armed only with 9 millimeter pistols.