Maute uses mosques to provoke military airstrike

LANAO DEL SUR, Philippines — Officials on Thursday warned that terrorists are deliberately holding out in mosques in Marawi City to provoke airstrikes they can hype as “sacrilegious” to trigger indignation by moderate Muslims.

Gov. Mujiv Hataman of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and his constituent-Maranaw lawmaker, Zia Alonto Adiong of the 24-member Regional Assembly, separately said that the Dawlah Islamiya want the two old and historic mosques in Marawi City they are occupying leveled by bombs to trigger an outcry among neutral Muslims.

“We must not forget that they attacked and vandalized the St. Mary’s Church in Marawi City to cause friction among Christians and Muslims. We are thankful to Mindanao’s Christian communities for being sober and for not responding the way these terrorists had wanted them to react,” said Hataman, chairman of the regional peace and order council.

Adiong, spokesman of the Lanao del Sur provincial crisis management committee, said the two worship sites being occupied by Maute and Abu Sayyaf gunmen — the Bato Islamic Mosque and the Lanao Mindanao Al-Islamie Center — both have high historical and religious values to ethnic Maranaws.

Adiong said gunmen had earlier destroyed their clan’s ancestral home built by his late grandfather, the late former Senator Damocao Alonto, the only Filipino-Muslim who received the King Faisal Award for Service to Islam by the King Faisal Foundation of the Saudi Arabian monarch.

Adiong said he does not believe that the leaders of the Maute group, comprised largely of ethnic Maranaws, are not aware that his grandfather was also a founding-member of the moderate Rabitat Al-Alam Al-Islamie, or the World Muslim League, which is based in Makkah, Saudia Arabia.

The religious organization has actively been propagating since its inception in 1962 a moderate kind of Islam and espouses its principles on religious tolerance and respect for other religions and non-Muslim religious leaders.

“How can you call yourself a Muslim if you destroy sites like this? Islam teaches preservation of anything with good educational value from where the youth can learn something good from,” Adiong said

Hataman said while he wants Marawi City cleared from terrorists, prudence must be exercised in forcing them out of the two mosques.

“Gustong-gusto nilang bombahin yang mga mosques na 'yan to gain sympathy and for moderate Muslims to get angry. They want to create the impression that there is persecution of Muslims in Mindanao. Well, there is none,” Hataman said.

Meanwhile, Hataman announced on Thursday that the regional government still has about P50 million for relief missions for 200,234 internally-displaced people (IDP) from conflict-stricken areas in Marawi City.

More than 40,000 of these IDPs are “house-based,” or those in houses of relatives outside of Marawi City.

Relief and emergency personnel of the Lanao del Sur provincial government and ARMM’s Humanitarian Emergency Assistance and Response Team are still focused on rescuing civilians trapped in villages where there are ongoing skirmishes.

Rescuers are also trying to locate more than 20 people reported as missing by relatives.

“We are hoping the conflict would be over soon,” Hataman said.