Philippine troops have clashed with Muslim guerrillas in a southern village, leaving at least three soldiers and four rebels dead, sparking fears that an escalation could threaten a 2014 peace pact that has considerably eased years of heavy fighting.
The sporadic clashes erupted on Tuesday and Wednesday in a village in Ungkaya Pukan on the island province of Basilan, where leaders of the military and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front separately ordered their forces to halt fighting and allow de-escalation talks yesterday.
Military and rebel commanders at the scene of the fighting accused each other of breaking the 2014 peace accord, which eased years of bloody and extensive fighting between government forces and the Muslim rebel front, the largest separatist insurgent group in the south of the largely Roman Catholic nation.
Photo: AP
The clashes left three soldiers dead and seven wounded, the military said, while the rebels reported at least four dead and several others wounded.
The conflict underscored the fragility of law and order in a southern region faced with a surfeit of loose firearms, private armies, crushing poverty and a long history of violence.
Under the 2014 peace pact, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front dropped its secessionist demand in exchange for a more powerful and better-funded Muslim autonomous region called Bangsamoro.
The five-province Muslim region is now led by former guerrilla leaders under a transition period ending in 2025.
Nearly half of about 40,000 guerrillas have agreed to lay down their firearms and return to normal life in exchange for livelihood packages under the peace pact. Thousands of other rebels have kept their firearms while waiting to be subjected to a years-long “decommissioning process,” a subtle term for surrendering their weapons. The process has been delayed amid complaints that former rebels have failed to receive promised cash and other incentives from the government.
“This is very alarming because the implications are worrisome to us,” Naguib Sinarimbo, the interior minister of the Bangsamoro autonomous region, said. “Our worry is if there are sparks like this, concerns may arise whether the decommissioning process would continue.”
General Domingo Gobway, an army brigade commander in Basilan, said his forces were cracking down on armed men involved in extortion and intimidation using homemade bombs.
Amid the military campaign, the gunmen fled to a Basilan village called Ulitan, where they were protected by Moro Islamic Liberation Front guerrillas, he said.
The rebels and the extortion gang were forced to leave Ulitan village in September amid the military crackdown, but Moro Islamic Liberation Front guerrillas returned on Monday with their firearms in contravention of an agreement that rebel firearms and other weapons should be restricted in mutually identified Moro Islamic Liberation Front encampments, Gobway said.
Troops came under fire in Ulitan on Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting them to return fire and take action to bring the situation under control, military officials said.
Mohagher Iqbal, who led the Muslim guerrillas in years of peace talks with the government, said the violence “was an unfortunate incident that no one desired to happen ... while the peace process’ dividends have started to be felt by the people.”
Iqbal called for the combatants’ “immediate disengagement to prevent the situation from escalating,” and urged government and rebel ceasefire representatives to carry out an investigation to prevent a repeat of such deadly clashes.
Western governments have welcomed progress in years of peace talks between Manila and Muslim rebels that have turned major battlefields into potential growth centers in the south in recent years, in the homeland for minority Muslims who live in some of the poorest and least-developed provinces in the country.
Had the decades-old Muslim insurgency continued to flare in the southern Philippines, there were worries that large numbers of Muslim insurgents could forge an alliance with outside militant forces and turn the south into a breeding ground for extremists.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS