Twenty years after receiving education at a church-run school in Marawi, the Maute brothers came back and set fire to their alma mater

Twenty years after obtaining Christian educations, Muslim brothers Omarkhayam and Abdullah Maute returned to their southern Philippine city with the black flags of the Islamic State group and set fire to their alma mater.

Hundreds of gunmen, many of them young locals recruited by the Maute brothers, destroyed Dansalan College in a rampage across Marawi city last month as they launched a brutal offensive to stamp their credentials as Philippine leaders of Islamic State.

It turned the siblings, aged in their mid 30s, into the most infamous high school alumni of the Protestant church-run institution, which had been a symbol of religious tolerance in the mostly Muslim city of 200,000 people.

The brothers have since remained holed up in parts of Marawi, using their local knowledge of tunnels and bomb-proof basements, to withstand a military offensive that has left entire neighbourhoods in ruins and claimed more than 300 lives.

“We do not understand where that hate is coming from,” said Zia Alonto Adiong, a member of the regional Parliament in a self-ruled Muslim area in the southern Philippines’ Mindanao region that includes Marawi.

Duma Sani, an ex-dean of Mindanao State University whose daughter also went to school with one of the Maute brothers, said most locals did not support their radical brand of Islam, under which non-believers must be killed.

Inspired by IS

The Maute group emerged as a small rag-tag group around 2012 from a decades-old Muslim separatist rebellion in Mindanao, which makes up one third of the predominantly Catholic Philippines.

As the main rebel organisation — the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) — sought to broker peace with the government, the Maute and other small hardline groups filled a vacuum for fanatics as they took inspiration from the IS’s atrocities in Iraq and Syria.

“I think what transformed the Mautes from a small band of siblings to a real serious military threat was the emergence of ISIS in the Middle East,” security analyst Sidney Jones told AFP, using an alternative acronym. But the brothers were radicalised much earlier: while pursuing studies in the Middle East after college, according to Jones and Rommel Banlaoi, head of the Manila-based Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research. Omarkhayam headed to Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, while Abdullah went to Jordan.

Mr. Banlaoi said they returned to Mindanao after about a decade overseas to be mentored by a fugitive Indonesian militant, Ustadz Sanussi, who in turn put them in touch with other Southeast Asian jihadists. Their main ally is Isnilon Hapilon, a leader of another hardline group called the Abu Sayyaf, who is on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted terrorists.