Scars of Marawi siege linger as Philippines poll nears
MARAWI: Near a resettlement site for survivors of the bloody 2017 siege of Marawi, a woman wearing a black face veil walks across a hilltop dotted by tombstones without names.
Near a Marawi resettlement site for siege survivors, a black-clad woman walks across a gravesite without names, anxiously wondering if her missing brother is among the unidentified graves. The Philippines is preparing to hold its first elections in nearly two years, but the scars of the 2017 Marawi siege still haunt the region. The Philippines military and Islamic State-linked gunmen battled for months, leaving the city's business district a ghost town and killing over a thousand civilians.
The gravesite serves as a painful reminder that the healing process is far from complete. The Marawi Compensation Board created to handle compensation claims for displaced individuals and families of the deceased has paid out around 6.5 billion pesos (US$104 million) so far, but at least half of the estimated 14,000 claimants are still waiting.
For families like Aminolla, who has yet to receive compensation, the government's slow response is seen as a major injustice.
Written by urgent.news from New Straits Times's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
