Government troops have killed at least 11 members of a rebel group in the southern Philippines that has pledged allegiance to ISIL, the military said, sending local communities fleeing as a battle raged on Sunday.
The Maute Group, one of a handful of small armed groups behind years of unrest in the south, had since Saturday occupied parts of a municipality in Lanao del Sur and were holed up in an abandoned town hall.
At least four soldiers were wounded in the clashes and there were unconfirmed reports that the group had raised an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant flag in the hall, said Marine Colonel Edgard Arevalo, a military spokesman.
Al Jazeera’s Jameela Alindogan, reporting from Manila, said the fight was ongoing with the town of Butig besieged and about 200 members of the Maute Group there.
“The leaders of this group are believed to have some foreign fighters who are also a part of this siege,” Alindogan said.
“They also took control of a high school and a mosque in the same town, now half of those residents have already fled and half of them remain to be stuck in that village, this is an operation that is expected to last for days.”
The military has not given an estimate for the number of displaced but local media reported an exodus of as many as 16,000 people from the area. Though the Philippines is predominantly Catholic, many people in the south are Muslim.