Only a week had passed since Mohammad Ali Acampong finished renovating his house when bombs and bullets struck Marawi City.

Pro-Islamic State militants were carving out their own “Wilayah”, or province, forcing nearly 100,000 people to flee. It became the Philippine military’s toughest and longest conflict since the Second World War.

On that day in 2017, 42-year-old Acampong, 42, left his three-storey lakeside house with his family of eight. “When the chaos began, our life suddenly became really difficult,” the government official told Reuters. “We had a comfortable life before. Now we live in between shelters, enduring heat, the lack of water, the lack of everything.”

Marawi was once one of the most picturesque cities in the Philippines. About half of it is now charred concrete and skeletons of buildings, the remains of 154 days of airstrikes and artillery fire by the military, as well as booby traps laid everywhere by the Islamist rebels.

The Acampongs now live in a tiny temporary housing unit on the city’s outskirts, competing with thousands of families for water and other basic utilities. At least 500 other families live in plastic tents – as does Asnia Sandiman, 25, who produces made-to-order clothing with a government-issued sewing machine.

Mohammad sits with his family in a school-turned-evacuation centre (Reuters/Eloisa Lopez)

“The tent is fine until it rains and it gets so cold, or until the heat is so bad,” Sandiman says. “My deepest hope is that we are allowed to go back to Marawi but honestly, I would take any permanent address just to get out of here.”

Hundreds of militants, 165 soldiers and at least 45 civilians were killed in the five-month conflict. President Rodrigo Duterte in October 2017 declared the city liberated, and its rehabilitation officially under way. But there is little sign of progress.

Bangon Marawi (Rise Marawi), an interagency task force in charge of reconstruction, has a deadline of 2021 for rebuilding and remains confident of meeting it. “We could only go as fast as legally possible,” its field office manager, Felix Castro, says. “We can’t make shortcuts. It takes a while in the beginning but it will be quick once it starts.”

Except for stray dogs and soldiers on guard, Marawi’s commercial centre has been abandoned. There is no sign of the promised rehabilitation.

Thousands of people are in limbo following a conflict that no one saw coming.