THE military admitted that the group led by Abdullah Maute is part of the Jemaah Islamiya terror network as government forces captured of their training camps in Butig, Lanao del Sur after a 10-day offensive.
“Yes, the Maute brothers are members of the Jemaah Islamiya,” said Major General Gerardo Barrientos, commander of the First Infantry “Tabak” Division. “In fact, it’s correct that [slain leader] Omar [Maute] was married to an Indonesian jihadist.”
Until he was slain in a military offensive last February, Abdullah Maute’s brother Omar used the lead the group which consists of former members of a defunct unit of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Major General Arnold Quiapo, chief of the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, said the group is known to be harboring foreign terrorists from Indonesia and Malaysia, as shown by the killing of Indonesian jihadist Muhammad Mukhtar who was killed together with Omar in February.
“These two groups [Maute and Abu Sayyaf] are both Islamists and terrorists believing in the ideals of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria even though each has unique characteristics,” Quiapo said.
“Some of the members are just sympathizers who were forced to join the group because of their involvement in the February clashes with government troops. They are not that many in numbers. In fact, a good number of them have already deserted the group,” Quiapo said.
Once described by the military as a small-time extortion gang, the Maute group attacked a remote army outpost in Butig in February, triggering a week of fighting that the military said left six soldiers and at least 12 militants dead.
The group, believed to have fewer than 100 fighters, blew up power transmission towers and abducted and beheaded two employees of a local sawmill in April.
But when Mukhtar and Omar were killed, the Maute group temporarily splintered into small groups to avoid detection until May 24 when the military detected that they began to move back into territory that the military secured in February, they said.
Colonel Roseller Murillo, commander of the Philippine Army’s 103rd Infantry Brigade, said government troops captured one of their camps after a 10-day battle that resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and 15 others wounded.
Surrounded by swamps and a lowland tropical rainforest in the small, Muslim-populated farming town of Butig in Lanao del Sur, more than 800 kilometers south of Manila, the camp’s structures were riddled with large bullet holes that soldiers said were caused by machine gun fire used to flush out the militants.
Soldiers said they killed dozens of militants, but there was no sign of dead bodies when the military allowed journalists into the area on Friday.
Unexploded improvised explosive devices, a grenade launcher, a rebel uniform and a black Islamic State flag were all that were left in the wooden huts and concrete-reinforced trenches, which were used by the gunmen, Murillo said.
“The Maute group is believed to be on the run and in hiding, [but] the military will fully enforce the law if they initiate other terrorist activities in the area,” he told AFP.