MARAWI: FIRST CHAPTER
It was May of 2017. Combined forces from the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police converged on Marawi City with a single, high-stakes objective: to capture Isnilon Hapilon, the leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group and the designated emir of the Islamic State in Southeast Asia. Three weeks prior, intelligence had warned that local jihadist factions were plotting a full-scale takeover of the city. What was supposed to be a surgical arrest operation quickly turned into a march straight into the lion’s den as the military’s sudden entry forced the militant groups to prematurely unleash their siege plans.
What would eventually be known as the Siege of Marawi lasted five months of raging battle, turning the only Islamic City in the Philippines into a battleground, and eventually into a ruined wasteland in the aftermath. Business establishments, houses of worship and homes where dreams were built upon, all gone.
For the most part, even up to this day.
One of the heavily damaged structures during the Siege of Marawi.
Ran along the streets of Ground Zero.
Stepping past the invisible border of Ground Zero, the first thing that hit us was not the physical wreckage, but the absolute, crushing silence. Looking at the hollowed-out concrete frames and the rusted rebar in photos is one thing, but standing amidst them is an entirely different weight. That very ground where we stood used to be a bustling residential neighborhood, alive with the sounds of families, trade, and daily life. Now, the only sound is the wind whistling through bullet holes. Walking through the streets felt less like exploring a city and more like walking through a cemetery of unfulfilled lives.
Scars of a turbulent past.
The more time we spent in the Ground Zero of Marawi, all the more the poignancy of the experience sank in. When Ran and I had our photos taken, we knew those were not tourist photos.
There was solemnity. There was silence. There was persistent, deafening silence.
In the midst of the ruins of war.
Ran went back to our service vehicle after our photo shoot. As for me, I headed to a place that I have been wanting to see. Consider it as a personal goal that I kept to myself, but I intended to achieve no matter what.
Not far from where we parked stood the Cathedral of the Territorial Prelature of Marawi. During the siege, it was one of the first places that were overtaken by the jihadist groups, holding parishioners hostage including then–Vicar General Fr. Teresito Soganub. Devotional images were destroyed. Pews set on fire. Sacred vessels, defiled. When government forces managed to recapture the cathedral, human remains were found inside.
I managed to find the rear gate of the cathedral, or at least what was left of it. There I stood before a steel gate shut before me, preventing me from stepping into the dilapidated structure within, reclaimed by the overgrowth through years of abandonment.
A deeper sense of silence hit me, then loud thoughts that only I could hear.
The feeling was eerily familiar. It was the same somber stillness that washed over me when I stood before the Cathedral of Jolo in 2025, itself a victim of terror back in 2019. Yet, the reality of Marawi was on an entirely different scale. This wasn’t just a single wounded structure; it was an entire community hollowed out and left behind by time.
Peering through the iron bars of the shut gate, I looked at how aggressively nature had begun to erase the architectural scars. Thick vines crept up the shattered concrete arches, and wild ferns sprouted from deep fissures where holy water might have once spilled. There is a strange, almost cruel poetry in how quickly the earth attempts to bury human tragedy. To the wild green overgrowth, the five-month siege was just a passing echo; to the jungle, this roofless, hollowed sanctuary was merely a clearing to be claimed.
My phone camera through the gate, capturing what is left of the cathedral.
The mask of greenery failed to soften the atmosphere. If anything, it made the abandonment feel more absolute. The vines did not heal the bullet holes; they simply hid them, wrapping around the jagged edges of broken pillars like a temporary bandage over an unhealed wound. I realized then that the most terrifying part of Ground Zero is not just the visible destruction—it is this quiet transition into a ghost town, where the vibrant history of a community is slowly being suffocated by weeds and time.
A cathedral, by its very definition, is meant to be a refuge, a physical manifestation of mercy, peace, and absolute sanctuary. To see it targeted and broken so deliberately shifted something fundamental inside of me. It forced me to confront the terrifying reality of what happens when fanatical hatred completely eclipses basic human empathy. The desecration did not stop when the pews turned to ash or when the devotional statues were shattered. The true desecration was the violation of the right to live, and to do so in peace and prosperity according to one’s beliefs. Standing there, I wondered how many years it would take for the echo of screams to finally fade out of a room, and whether a space that has witnessed that much terror can ever truly feel holy again.
The cathedral from within the wall.
I finally turned and began walking back toward our service vehicle, pausing to cast one last glimpse at the cathedral ruins. Standing at that final threshold, the silence did not feel peaceful anymore. It felt heavy and suffocating, like the city was held in a permanent state of purgatory. Marawi was suspended between a violent past it could not escape and a restored future it was still desperately waiting to touch. I was just a temporary witness passing through, capable of walking away whenever I chose, but the weight of those who had no choice but to stay behind and live among these ruins sat heavily on my chest.
According to Amnesty International, there were around 360,000 people that were displaced by the conflict. More than 1,400 persons were wounded, and the casualties totaled 1,132: 920 from the side of the militants, 165 from the government forces, and 47 civilians. After the conflict, some of the displaced population was able to return to their houses, rebuilt them and started looking forward to starting anew. For those whose lives were rooted right there in Ground Zero, however—those who had nothing to return to—the future remains entirely vague, if not completely bleak.
The concrete skeletons that surrounded us are more than just bullet-riddled debris; they are the physical markers of an entire neighborhood transformed into a ghost town, frozen forever in the trauma of 2017. Nearly a decade has slipped by for the rest of the world, but here, time remains violently arrested. Every hollow window frame and exposed pillar serves as an agonizing monument to families who vanished into the statistics, leaving behind a silence that refuses to be filled.
The sound of our service vehicle’s door shutting felt loud, almost irreverent, breaking the heavy stillness as we prepared to leave. As we pulled away, I watched the jagged skyline of Ground Zero drift past my window. The ruins gradually blurred, but the invisible weight of the place lingered inside the van, a quiet passenger traveling with us.
Christian or Muslim, no destruction can make faith waver.
Ground Zero stands as an unhealed wound, a testament to total and absolute destruction. Yet, a city is defined by more than its tragedies, and our immersion into Marawi’s complex reality was only just beginning. To understand how a community learns to breathe again after the sky has fallen, we had to leave the suffocating silence of the residential blocks behind. We turned our direction toward the water, heading to Rizal Park near the shores of Lake Lanao, where the old scars of the siege meet the fragile, defiant rhythm of returning life.
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