BASILAN ISLAND, 12 July 2007 — At least 14 Marines who were searching for a kidnapped Italian priest were killed in an ambush by Moro guerrillas in this southern island of Basilan, officials said yesterday. Ten of the fallen soldiers were beheaded.
Col. Ramiro Alivio, the island’s military commander, said about 100 soldiers of the 1st Marine Brigade were sent to check a report that the Rev. Giancarlo Bossi was spotted at a village Tipo-Tipo town on Tuesday.
“Troops were verifying reports that Father Bossi was spotted in the area, but it turned out negative. Our forces were returning to base at about 10 a.m. when they came under fire and fighting broke out,” Alivio said, adding, troops fought about 300 gunmen for eight hours.
Alivio earlier said only four soldiers were killed but later said the number jumped to 14 when the bodies of 10 others were recovered, all beheaded.
“We can confirm 14 were killed and nine were wounded,” Alivio told AFP.
“All of our men have (now) been accounted for,” he said, adding that at least 30 Abu Sayyaf and MILF gunmen were killed in the clashes.
“It is a conservative estimate, but villagers and intelligence reports said there could be more enemy casualties,”
Some of the beheaded were found by local officials in Basilan and turned over to the military, other soldiers said.
Intelligence reports said Bossi, 57, was being kept in an area where MILF forces were known to operate and the troops had been sent in to investigate, said Alivio.
Bossi, of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), was seized by unknown gunmen near his parish church in Zamboanga Peninsula on June 10.
The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which is engaged in peace talks with the government, admitted that its fighters were involved in the Basilan clash and blamed the Marines for provoking hostilities.
Mohagher Iqbal, the MILF’s chief peace negotiator, said the Marines encroached inside their stronghold without informing the Coordinating Committee on the Cessation of Hostilities (CCCH), the implementing body for the cease-fire between the military and the MILF.
“Definitely we will file a protest (before CCCH). This is a definite cease-fire violation,” Iqbal told reporters. He said their troops in the area were taken by surprise upon seeing the soldiers and decided to fire on them.
During the firefight, Iqbal said four of their guerrillas were killed and seven others were wounded.
Un-Islamic
Iqbal admitted that MILF rebels scouring the area after the firefight recovered 11 headless corpses.
But he could not explain why the dead soldiers had to be beheaded.
“I received the report that our troops beheaded seven Marines early this morning. We are investigating and determining the identities of those involved. We have an existing policy not to harm any captured enemy,” Iqbal said. “That is against Islam.”
Iqbal said the MILF had “no information” on reports that the Abu Sayyaf was keeping Bossi in Basilan, a known bailiwick of the extremist Muslim rebel group.
Asked if there were Abu Sayyaf forces in Tipo-Tipo, Iqbal said: “Definitely not...The government knows. The soldiers know that (Tipo-Tipo) is an MILF area.”
MILF spokesman Eid Kabalu also denied that the Abu Sayyaf was involved and echoed Iqbal in accusing the military of violating the cease-fire agreement by entering an MILF area.
The provocation, he said, was a clear violation of a 2003 truce and would be brought up to a joint monitoring committee.
Treachery
But Alivio and Lt. Col. Ariel Caculitan, spokesman for the Philippine Marines, maintained that the troops, who rode seven military trucks, were ambushed while on their way back to their headquarters.
Alivio said the trucks were moving slowly because it was raining when fired upon and hit with mortar fire.
He said the soldiers engaged the armed men in a heavy firefight that lasted for about 10 hours.
“It was a very treacherous attack,” Caculitan told a news conference.
Caculitan insisted that it was the Abu Sayyaf, supported by unidentified “lawless elements” that had engaged the Marines.
The casualty count on Tuesday was the biggest for the Marine Corps since 2005, when 12 Marines were killed in an encounter with the Abu Sayyaf in Patikul town, Sulu province.
Alivio said rebel forces destroyed two M35 military trucks and captured another during the fighting.
Outnumbered and Outgunned
A television reporter who was with the convoy of Marines said the government troops were clearly “outnumbered and outgunned.”
“I got a first hand experience of hell,” said Jun Veneracion, 36-year-old reporter of GMA-7 in a phone interview.
Veneracion said he had an eerie feeling the moment the military convoy — one in which he and two other crewmembers were riding — rolled past an area of empty houses last Tuesday.
Veneracion recalled from past conversations he had with soldiers that empty houses in a community in volatile places like Basilan signaled “trouble” and that it was likely just around the corner. He was right.
Veneracion said heavy firing “from all directions” suddenly erupted a few minutes after the convoy turned back to assist a dump truck, the last vehicle in the convoy, which had gotten stuck in mud.
By that time, he and cameraman Julius Catibog and assistant cameraman Donny Rojas, had gone down from the 6X6 truck they had been riding in with 20 Marines.
He admitted that the first salvo — which included mortar shells — were the scariest five minutes of his life.
“I prayed and prayed for the firing to stop,” said Veneracion.
But his prayers were not answered because the heavy firing resumed and soon “ what we did was hit the ground, crawl, hit the ground.”
‘Teary-eyed’
During the drawn-out firefight between 10:30 a.m. and early evening were periods of waiting for the next volley to erupt. He recalled that whenever they were on the ground taking cover, he and his teammates would look each other.
The attackers, he said, were near enough for them to hear their voices.
“We heard them shouting many times while they kept on shooting and we thought that it was our last,” he added.
There was a point when Veneracion said he became teary-eyed after a Marine became teary-eyed himself.
“The firepower of the other side was far greater than that of the military,” he said, citing the volume of mortar fire the Marines took. By his own count, Veneracion said the Marines were “vastly outnumbered” by the enemy. The government troops numbered about 100. The other side he estimated to be 500 “very determined attackers,” he said.
“But even if they were outnumbered, the Marines stood their ground,” he said.
Even with the heavy firing around them, the television crew was able to videotape the firefight, he said.
But when they had to rush to another location, the crew had to abandon their camera equipment, which was later retrieved by military reinforcements.
It was sundown, said Veneracion, after 30 minutes of walking and running, when he and his team, with the Marines guiding them, reached a place where there were reinforcement teams.
Escaping the hellish situation, he said, was a “miracle, to say the least.” (With reports from Inquirer News Service & Agencies)
