PIKIT, North Cotabato: Philippine Air Force planes yesterday bombed suspected Moro rebel positions and ground troops pounded them with cannons and mortars after hundreds of fighters defied a government ultimatum to withdraw.
Eyewitness accounts put government casualties at three dead, while officials said one Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) fighter was killed in the clashes that erupted mainly in North Cotabato province.
Armed Forces Vice Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Cardozo Luna said fighting was taking place “eyeball-to-eyeball” in some areas and that the military and police were “prepared for a long drawn-out action,” Agence France-Presse reported.
Some 500 fighters were involved in the fighting with army units, including those from the 602nd Brigade, the 40th Infantry Battalion, and 7th Infantry Battalion, according to Brig. Gen. Jorge Segovia, acting AFP command center chief. Military reports mentioned no deaths among soldiers but said at least six of them were wounded in skirmishes that occurred in areas largely outside the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), where regional elections were to be held today.
There was no indication that the new flare-up was directly related to the ARMM elections. But some of the fighting spilled over to two villages in Northern Kabuntalan, in Shariff Kabunsuan, where the rebels suffered one dead, according to Chief Supt. Joel Goltiao, the ARMM police director.
The weeklong tension has forced some 100,000 villagers to flee their homes, relief officials in North Cotabato said.
Guided by troops on the ground, OV-10 Broncos, SF-260 planes and MG-520 attack helicopters hammered MILF positions in North Cotabato with 260-pound bombs and rockets, a senior PAF official monitoring the military operation said.
“We already launched air operations using OV-10s, MG-520s and SF-260s. Bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire were delivered to targets given by ground troops,” said the official, who asked not to be named because he was not in charge of releasing statements to the media.
The bombs were dropped in the area “of the 105th Base Command of the MILF, which is out of control already,” the official told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Further airstrikes were expected until MILF troops heeded the government’s demand for a pullout.
