MARAWI, Philippines - Philippine security forces have killed 89 Islamist militants during more than a week of fighting in a southern city but the gunmen are still offering strong resistance and holding hostages, the military said Wednesday.
Attack
helicopters fired rockets repeatedly on Wednesday morning into the
pockets of Marawi city where the militants were hiding among trapped
residents, according to an AFP reporter who was following troops
searching houses.
The clashes erupted on Tuesday last week when
gunmen waving black flags of the Islamic State (IS) group rampaged
through the mostly Muslim-populated city in response to an effort by
security forces to arrest a Filipino on the US government's list of
most-wanted terrorists.
That militant leader, Isnilon Hapilon,
escaped but he was still believed to be in Marawi, military spokesman
Brigadier-General Restituto Padilla said Wednesday.
Eighty-nine militants had been killed in the efforts to reclaim the city and find Hapilon, Padilla told reporters.
He said the military was making "very positive" progress towards
ending the crisis, which had also seen 21 security forces and 19
civilians killed.
However
Padilla acknowledged there were many residents still trapped in the 10
percent of the city that the gunmen were controlling, and that troops
would likely meet increasingly strong resistance there.
"That 10
percent is most likely the area that is heavily guarded and defended by
any armed men if they are protecting any individual of high value,"
Padilla said.
Padilla said he did not know how many militants remained.
He
said they had been reinforced by prisoners who escaped from two jails
during the initial rampage, and "sympathisers" of the militants.
There were more than 2,000 residents still trapped in areas of Marawi
held by the militants, Zia Alonto Adiong, spokesman for the provincial
crisis management committee, told AFP.
The militants also took a priest and up to 14 other people hostage at the start of the crisis.
A
video of the priest appeared on social media on Tuesday in which he
repeated the militants' demands to withdraw, and said the militants were
holding 240 people hostage.
"The video may seem to be authentic," Padilla said, although he cautioned military technology experts were still verifying it.
Padilla
also emphasised the video was being used for propaganda, that the
priest was speaking under duress and he did not know if the figure about
the number of hostages was correct.
President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law across the entire
southern region of Mindanao, home to roughly 20 million people, in
response to the crisis.
He said the Marawi violence showed that
local militant groups were uniting behind IS and becoming a major
security threat across Mindanao.
Source - TheNation
