MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – After five months of crippling conflict, there are slow signs of life returning in the Philippines’ battered Marawi City.

Utilities engineers were at work on Thursday in the near-deserted outskirts of Marawi which escaped the daily air strikes that flattened vast swathes of the city.

A few groceries, motorcycle repair shops and gasoline sellers have opened, ready for the first batch of returning residents in the coming days.

Nearly 6,500 families will be headed back to the homes that were left intact, out of the 353,000 people displaced when hundreds of pro-Islamic State gunmen ran amok and seized control of central Marawi in May.

Combat operations ended on Monday, when the last fighters were killed in a fierce final stand. With vehicles crushed and overturned and buildings reduced to skeletons of mangled steel and rubble, the city appears to be in the aftermath of a war that lasted years, rather than months.

Amelah Ampaso said she decided that day to sneak back to Marawi and reopen her shop, now stocked with cooking oil and cigarettes and offering photocopying services, printing, and haircuts.

As a first-mover in a liberated Marawi, the 25-year-old is doing brisk business among the few people around.

“The other shops are closed, so people are coming here,” she said. “It’s safe again.”

But nearby streets look like the set of a post-apocalyptic film, silent, with shutters pulled down and weeds growing between concrete slabs. Rust and decay is setting in after months of heavy rains and neglect.

Spray painted on the walls of almost every building is the word “clear”, marking where police and soldiers went house-to-house checking thousands of abandoned properties for booby-traps or signs of insurgents hiding.

The fighting has taken a heavy toll, killing more than 1,100 people, mostly militants, and reducing a large part of the interior of the city to piles of rubble, leaving only shells of uninhabitable gray buildings.

Shop owner Madid Noor, 64, returned two months into the battle, reassured by detachments of soldiers and police nearby, and unperturbed by what were constant explosions and the howling of fighter jets over the city.

After a few lean months, he hopes returnees will come to him to buy washing powder, petrol and fake branded sportswear.

“Some days we have customers. But not every day,” he said.

(Reporting by Martin Petty; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

By Martin Petty

MARAWI CITY, Philippines (Reuters) – With vehicles crushed and overturned and buildings reduced to skeletons of mangled steel and rubble, the Philippine city of Marawi resembles the aftermath of a war that lasted years, rather than months.

Except for small clusters of troops dotted amid the ruins and skinny cats and dogs scavenging for food, the heart of Marawi is a ghost town, all but destroyed by the Philippines’ biggest and fiercest urban battle in recent history.

Hundreds of rebels claiming allegiance to Islamic State seized large areas of the city of 200,000 people in May and clung on through unrelenting government air strikes and artillery bombardments, right until the last remaining gunmen were killed three days ago.

The military escorted media on Wednesday through the ravaged streets of the once picturesque lakeside town, showing for the first time the front lines of a devastating conflict that has stoked fears of Islamic State’s extremist agenda taking root in the region.

The scale of the damage was stark as a convoy of vans carrying reporters and cameramen followed an army truck through one district after another, stopping off at key intersections recently cleared of unexploded munitions and booby traps.

Wide boulevards in the city were lined by crumbling homes and shop fronts missing higher floors, with fragments of chairs, children’s toys and household appliances wedged into piles of crumbled concrete.

Tattered pieces of clothing poking above banks of rubble provided the only color in the mass of gutted grey buildings blackened by smoke. Vans, pickup trucks and cars were turned over, coated in rust or torn apart by bomb blasts.

The militants’ planning, stockpiling of weapons and their combat capability stunned government forces, who had to fight street by street to take back the city and were often pinned down by snipers and homemade bombs.

“At first our forces cannot press them, they moved from one building to the next. Our concept was to restrict them – it took time, but we constricted them,” said Lieutenant Colonel Sam Yunque, a special forces commander deployed in Marawi since the beginning of the conflict.

“We innovated to suppress their techniques. They were not better than us, that’s why they lost.”

RUINS OF WAR

The Philippines announced the end of combat operations in Marawi City on Monday after troops killed 42 remaining militants, including some foreign fighters. More than 1,100 people, including 165 troops and 45 civilians, died in the conflict. The government has said the rest were militants.

Senior officers said they took pains to protect the multitude of mosques in what is the only designated Islamic City in the mainly Catholic Philippines. Although many escaped the pounding of daily air strikes, domes and walls were peppered with holes from heavy machine gun fire as troops sought to flush out rebels hiding within.

Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis praised Filipino soldiers for defeating the militants without attracting allegations of human rights violations.

The United States provided critical tactical intelligence in the Marawi combat operation, deploying surveillance planes and drones, thermal imaging and eavesdropping equipment.

The walls were blasted away at Marawi’s police headquarters where the armory was looted, and in the adjacent jail where more than 100 prisoners were freed.

Close by, a mosque minaret had fallen into a mash of metal and rock. Behind it was a lone, leafless tree with only a few branches left.

The militants smashed through thick layers of concrete to turn drainage channels into trenches, doubling as tunnels for fighters to move between buildings and elude surveillance drones and army snipers.

Rebel-held buildings were covered with graffiti, including one of an arrow through a heart, with the message “I love ISIS”, an acronym for Islamic State.

But there was no love for the rebel alliance among the hundreds of jubilant soldiers at send-off ceremonies held this week as troops gradually return home.

Colonel Corleto Vinluan, the commander of joint special operations, described the enemy as “rats”.

He said the military had gained valuable experience in urban combat and chose a strategy that took time, but ultimately paid off.

“We couldn’t just enter the area, it was very big, we did not know where the leaders were, we had to surround them and the area became smaller. It was that time when we really took control,” Vinluan told Reuters.

“We didn’t expect they’ll last that long, their ammunition their firearms and their food. We learned a lot from this event, we adjusted our strategies.

“They were tough fighters, some of them, but not all.”

(Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)