WATCH | Mother fears her missing child may have become Maute child warrior

August 28, 2017 - 11:53 PM
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Missing child feared drafted to Maute
Detail from Facebook posts by a mother who fears her missing child may habe been drafted int the ranks of Maute child warriors.

It breaks a mother’s heart to lose her child. For the mother of Azramie Magondacan, also known by the moniker Ram-Ram, having her son kidnapped on July 4, 2010, at the age of three, was most unbearable. She decided to channel the grief to social media.

In the Facebook page that she created on behalf of Ram-Ram, Rowhanisa Abdul Jabar relates that her son was taken away from the apartment they were renting in Tondo, Manila by their housemaid identified as Ula Arada, plus a certain “Liza” and a certain “JR”.

She suspects that there is one other conspirator in the kidnapping: a Sittie Milva
Sabatol, who had recommended Ula to work with the family.

The boy has not been heard from since 2010.

Rowhanisa fears that her son might have been fallen into the hands of recruiters for the terrorist Maute Group presently still engaged in a violent standoff with government troops in the Islamic City of Marawi.

Some netizens who have seen the Facebook page remarked that there is a semblance of similarity between pictures of the boy and one of the suspected child warriors of the Maute Group.

The military has condemned the use by Maute of minors as combatants, which is disallowed in the Islamic faith, and is also a violation of International Humanitarian Law.

Sources at the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) say they are still in the process of validating whether or not the pictures of Ram-Ram and that of the alleged Maute child warrior belong to one and the same person.

While government forces want very much to rescue the child warriors from the clutches of the Maute Group, Col. Romeo Brawner, deputy commander of Joint Task Force Ranao, said: “When they are armed and in direct confrontation with our frontline forces, we might be left with no other choice but to confront the threat and neutralize the threat.”.

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