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16-06-2023
MANILA/ MARAWI: In Marawi, on the southern island of Mindanao in the Philippines, two rented apartments a few streets apart are perforated with fresh bullet holes.
The tenants, who arrived two months ago at the first apartment and last week at the second, were women with young children, and the interiors are strewn with the debris of domestic life: baby clothes, kitchen utensils, a pram but in 
the early hours of Wednesday morning, the loudspeaker at a nearby mosque warned residents to stay inside as more than 100 officers from five Philippine army and police battalions stormed both locations, leading to an exchange of fire that ended the lives of two senior fighters from the ISIL (ISIS)-linked Dawlah Islamiya Maute (DI-Maute) group who were hiding in the flats.
“That woman told us that her husband was working in Saudi Arabia. We didn’t even know he was here,” neighbor Faridah Cotaan Saripada told media. “We didn’t know the house was rented to (ISIL).”
The raids targeted two of the region’s most senior ISIL-affiliated fighters; Abu Zacharia, the head of DI-Maute and the so-called Emir of ISIL in Southeast Asia, according to the Philippine military, and Abu Morsid, the DI-Maute group’s logistics mastermind.
The deaths have left the group without a leader – and reduced its local footprint to a retreating band of mostly child soldiers, according to a source in the Philippine military on condition of anonymity but the bloodshed also left locals reeling in Marawi, much of which still lies in ruins from the devastating five-month siege that followed DI-Maute’s seizure of the city in 2017.
In the house where Abu Morsid was killed, the family that unknowingly rented him the property pointed out the bloodstains and brain matter mixed with broken concrete on the floor.
“We are anti-ISIS. We experienced already the Marawi siege. It was a nightmare. We don’t want it to happen again,” said an older relative, who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals. “We’re just praying every month that this will be the last of it. We’re thankful that the authorities discovered them.”
Neighbours reported seeing soldiers remove, unharmed, the female tenant and three children from the apartment with Abu Zacharia, as well as one of the two women claiming to be sisters, who rented the house where Abu Mosid was killed. However, a second woman and her baby living at the property had already absconded, according to the landlady and her family. (Int’l News Desk)
