Introduction

On 23 October 2017, the Philippine government officially announced the end of the five-month battle in Marawi against Islamic State militants under Isnilon Hapilon and the Maute group. The Maute group centred on a family with ties to extremists in the Middle East and Indonesia, and the assault in Marawi was led by two brothers (Fonbuena 2017b).

The campaign by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which featured aerial bombardment and urban warfare, resulted in over a hundred civilian deaths, hundreds of thousands displaced and the destruction of the city's infrastructure and neighbourhoods at “ground zero”. The humanitarian response drew from a diverse set of government and civil society actors, working in multilayered coordination platforms which knitted together civilians and the military in crucial tasks such as rescue, retrieval and relief provisioning to displaced populations (Fonbuena 2020; Yabes 2020).

This chapter describes the armed and humanitarian responses to the Marawi crisis by highlighting in-theatre engagements between local civilian elites, civil society actors and military leaders in combat, rescue and retrieval operations and humanitarian provisioning. It describes the various coordination platforms and how they structure such engagements. It identifies the norming, gains and gaps in local civil-military relations. We see that civil-military relations during the Marawi war were spatial and task-based: the military focused on combat, while local government authorities and humanitarian responders focused on relief provisioning. The multilevel (national and provincial) government and cluster-based coordination platforms that pre-date the Marawi conflict were in place. Still, they functioned separately from platforms established by the military for civil-military coordination to support their combat mission. Military control over space and civilian cognisance of the martial law conditions during the Marawi conflict adversely affected humanitarian deliveries. A significant finding of this chapter is that there was no institutional norming of previous peacetime civil-military frameworks. In the face of an unexpected and intense military campaign, these frameworks fell away. Divergent views about who held informal power and how this would be exercised led to contestation over the conduct of rescue missions, aerial bombardment and accounting for the dead and missing. The military exhibited rulebased and culture-sensitive behaviour in the security measures they undertook but had little interface with local humanitarian actors. These responses occurred against the backdrop of the 23 May 2017 declaration by President Duterte of martial law in Mindanao (Proclamation 216, series of 2017), which legally privileged the military and the police to carry out stricter security measures.