MANILA - President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday denied sending an emissary to hold back-channel talks with the Islamic State-linked Maute group in a bid to resolve the crisis in Marawi City.

“No. I did not,” Duterte responded when asked about the report that he was, at one point, ready to make a deal with extremists to end the long-drawn conflict in the Islamic city.

A Reuters report on Wednesday said Agakhan Sharief, a prominent Muslim leader, was approached by a senior Duterte aide to use his connections with the Maute militant group's leaders to start back-channel talks.

Duterte, however, called Sharief a “pretender," adding he would never hold talks with terrorists.

“I would never talk to terrorists, but I’d talk to revolutionaries who are imbued with principles,” he told reporters in Bukidnon.

Sharief, known locally as "Bin Laden" due to his resemblance to the late al Qaeda leader, would not reveal the identity of Duterte's aide, whom he said was confidentially assigned to set up a meeting with the Maute clan to pursue possible negotiations.

He said the aide agreed that he would accompany the Maute brothers' influential mother, Farhana, by helicopter to meet Duterte in nearby Cagayan De Oro or Davao City.

Sharief said it was Farhana's sons who requested she represent them in talks with Duterte.

"He (Duterte's aide) prepared everything that I needed. I told him that I need a chopper to get the mother of the Maute brothers to bring her to the president. He prepared that," Sharief said in the Reuters report.

"I called the Maute brothers and their mother ... I told them, I convinced them."

Sharief said the president was prepared to offer the Maute clan implementation of the Sharia law in their hometown, Butig, if he achieves his goal of establishing a federal system in the Philippines.

The talks did not push through, and the terror leaders' mother was arrested on June 9 in Lanao del Sur. The patriarch, Cayamora Maute, was apprehended three days earlier in Davao City.

The cleric said that the rebels would have taken Duterte's deal to end the siege.

"They agreed, they supported this," said Sharief, who last met with Abdullah Maute on June 25, when he led a group of emissaries into the heart of Marawi to free some hostages during the Eid al-Fitr Islamic holiday.

Sharief said he was against Islamic State's radical ideology but was reluctant to speak out against the Maute clan as he still hoped he could convince them to end the siege.

"I am a peacemaker," he said. "I cannot negotiate anymore if I talk against them."

Clashes erupted in the city on May 23 after government troops attempted to arrest senior Abu Sayyaf leader Isnilon Hapilon, known as Islamic State's anointed leader in Southeast Asia. The Philippine government and military said while government troops failed to catch Hapilon, the operation thwarted a bigger attack by the terrorists.

At least 475 people - 351 suspected terrorists, 39 civilians, and 85 government troops - have died since the clashes erupted.

About 400,000 civilians from Marawi and outlying areas have also been displaced as a result of the fighting.

While the government has put the civilian death toll at 39, the military believes this could “increase significantly” as troops have yet to reach other parts of the city where some trapped civilians were feared to have been executed.

The emergence of groups pledging allegiance to Islamic State has been considered as the biggest security problem to face the year-old Duterte administration.

The rise of pro-ISIS groups in the country has also raised alarm in Washington and the Philippines’ neighbors in the region, which fear that the notorious terror group was seeking to establish a new front in Asia amid its successive losses in Iraq and Syria. -- with reports from Reuters