In the early afternoon of May 23, 2017, right before a lunch break in a small seaside village on Mindanao, an island in the southern Philippines, I received a text message that told me something had happened in Marawi, a town I had visited just hours earlier. My police contact offered few details on the phone, but he sounded troubled. There were reports of gunfire in the city. An hour later, the first images went viral on social media. The entire world could see armed men in black carrying high-powered firearms taking control of the Philippines’ so-called “Islamic City.” What followed was a five-month nightmare in a town 5,000 miles from the dying caliphate of the Islamic State group in the Middle East. The battle would obliterate 24 districts, kill more than 1,000 and displace over 200,000 Maranao or Mëranaw people, members of the ethno-linguistic community living in the Lanao provinces of Mindanao.
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