A DEADLY NEW FRONT FOR ISIS
On what was to be her wedding day, Stephanie Villarosa ate chocolate-flavored rice porridge out of a Styrofoam cup. Under normal circumstances—rings exchanged, fidelity promised, bride kissed—she and her family would have been feasting on lechón, or roasted suckling pig, a delicacy in her fiancé’s hometown of Iligan City on the island of Mindanao.
Instead, Villarosa was huddled on an institutional plastic chair about 24 miles south of Iligan, inside Marawi City’s provincial government building, where she was finally safe after hiding in a house for 11 days. Outside, sniper fire crackled over the mosque-dotted hills to the east and military FA-50 fighter jets thundered overhead. Wedding or no, the porridge was nourishing and Villarosa was happy: “God is good. Today we survived.”
Survival has become a daily battle in Marawi, the capital of Mindanao’s Lanao del Sur province, whose mostly Muslim population of 202,000 people makes the city the biggest Islamic community in what is otherwise an overwhelmingly Catholic country. Since May 23, Marawi has been under siege by what locals call Grupo ISIS, an ad hoc coalition of insurgent and kidnap-for-ransom militias that have pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their swift initial success flew in the face of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s characteristically cocky assurances: “I can be the same.
