Criselda Yabes is a journalist based in the Philippines. She is author of "The Battle of Marawi," her tenth book, which was published in September.
Six months after the end of the 2017 battle of Marawi in the southern Philippines, residents were allowed into ground zero for just a few hours to retrieve whatever they could of their possessions destroyed in the five months of fighting and bombing. But they could not return, until today, to their ruined lakeside city, to pick up the pieces of their lives.
