Maute gunmen plunder villages as hostilities in Butig continue

MARAWI CITY --- The number of displaced families in Butig town swelled to 2,450 by noontime Monday as members of the outlawed Dawlah Islamiya continued plundering villages and looting abandoned houses before fleeing whenever soldiers come close to drive them away.Nineteen fanatical Islamic militants were killed while 13 soldiers have been wounded in the intermittent encounters, according to senior Army and police officials in Lanao del Sur province.A matrix obtained Tuesday from the office of Gov. Soraya Alonto-Adiong indicated that the evacuees were from eight peasant enclaves in Butig, a hinterland town in the first district of Lanao del Sur.Extremists, led by relatives Abdullah and Omar Maute, founders of the outlawed Dawlah Islamiya, are locked in a showdown in hinterland areas in Butig since Saturday.Residents of two barangays in nearby Lumbayanague town, Wago and Raya, both near Butig, have also fled for fear of getting trapped in the crossfire.The provincial government initially distributed more than three tons of relief supplies to the evacuees on Sunday.Salma Jayne Tamano, provincial information officer, said workers are to distribute more relief supplies in evacuation sites in the next three days.She said the office of the provincial governor will sustain the needs of the evacuees while government forces are still trying to restore normalcy in Butig.Haroun Al-Rashid Lucman, regional vice governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said employees of ARMM’s social welfare department are now preparing individual relief packs for each of the affected families. We are hoping the situation there will return to normal soon, said Lucman, also concurrent regional secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development-ARMM.Lucman said they have enlisted the help of influential Muslim religious leaders and respected elders in Lanao del Sur to help convince the extremists now sowing havoc in Butig to leave for the sake of the innocent Maranaw folks there.The Dawlah Islamiya, also known as the Maute terror group, is an extremely radical organization boasting of loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.Senior members of different municipal peace and order councils in Lanao del Sur said Tuesday morning that by noontime Monday, the Dawlah Islamia already has 19 fatalities, among them adolescents.The hostilities erupted after the militants hoisted the black ISIS banner in strategic areas in Butig. They keep saying that they are fighting for Islam and for an Islamic state in Mindanao but what they are doing is absolutely a total turnaround from the Islamic teachings on peace and co-existence with non-Muslims, said a municipal councilor who is related by blood to the Maute clan in Butig.The police also confirmed that the extremists had looted houses in villages they attacked and took with them farm animals, including water buffaloes as they eluded responding soldiers.The group has been enforcing a Taliban-style justice system in far-flung areas where it has clandestine Sharia courts that are rabidly opposed by local mainstream Islamic theologians.