Maute want mosques bombed to spark anger of neutral Muslims

LANAO
DEL SUR --- 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 (ARMM) and
his constituent-Maranaw lawmaker, Zia Alonto Adiong of the 24-member
Regional Assembly, separately said Thursday 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 saidHataman
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
on-going 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.