ILIGAN CITY, Philippines— As the fighting between members of a local terror
group and the armed forces in Marawi City reaches its fifth day, a military
official has admitted it might take some time before the area could be
considered as fully neutralized.
Lieutenant General Eduardo Año, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of
the Philippines, said government soldiers might have the upper hand but the
area had proved to be difficult to penetrate.
“We are in total control of the whole area, but it has not been cleared
of the terror group because of the urban terrain,” Año told reporters on the
sidelines of the visit of President Rodrigo Duterte to the Philippine Army’s
2nd Mechanized Battalion headquarters in Barangay Maria Cristina late Friday
afternoon.
Año has placed the number of the Maute Group occupying some structures
and houses within Marawi’s downtown at less than a hundred, but the challenge
is the insurgents’ position.
“We have to clear one step at a time, house to house, block by block,”
he said, adding that the military operations will not be easy in an urban
terrain as compared to the rural area.
He said the soldiers used simple tactic in operating in a rural setting
which cannot be applied in a city battle. “Here (Marawi) all it takes is for an
armed person to position himself inside a building… it would take time before
it could be cleared.
To fast track the clearing operations of the military, Año said they
had sent more soldiers to Marawi.
“We have enough troops, but we need additional reinforcement to speed
up our clearing,” he said without divulging the actual number of soldiers
deployed to Marawi.
Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said the situation in Marawi would
be normalized before the expiration of the 60-day martial law declared by
Duterte.
As of press time, civilians from Marawi continue to arrive at various
evacuation sites in neighboring towns and in Iligan City.
In Saguiaran, Lanao del Sur, for instance, there are about 1,300
families staying in the town gymnasium, according to the information provided
by the Provincial Crisis Management Committee.
The municipality of Ditsaan Ramain has some 2,737 households, and around
13,000 individuals seeking shelter in the public gymnasium.
In Iligan, there are about 2,000 evacuees at the temporary shelter in
Barangay Buru-un, and more than a thousand in Barangay Maria Cristina. (Jigger
J. Jerusalem/PNA)#DefendRepublic
No comments:
Post a Comment