Government forces in the central Philippines have killed at least 10 Maoist guerrillas in several gun battles, the military said on Monday, in a deadly flare-up of the decades-old insurgency.
Troops were fighting “remnants” of the New People’s Army (NPA) rebel group on Sunday near the municipality of Toboso on Negros island, the regional military command said.
The exact number of dead rebels was uncertain, with Philippine Army spokesman Colonel Louie Dema-ala in Manila saying as many as 19 might have been killed.
The central Philippines military command said in a statement that “at least 10” NPA rebels were killed, including their local leader, Roger Fabillar, in six firefights that all occurred in Toboso on Sunday.
Set up 57 years ago, the NPA is fighting one of the world’s longest-running communist insurgencies. The military estimates the rebel group has fewer than 2,000 armed members left.
More than 300 residents of Toboso – a village of 5,000-plus people – fled their homes on Sunday as gunfire rang out in the remote sugar cane-farming region, the municipal disaster management office said.
On Monday, some left a junior school where they had spent the night, and returned to their homes, said Hospicio Carbajosa, the Toboso municipal disaster management officer.
“We did not really see what happened, but residents told us a firefight occurred near a commercial fishery farm,” Carbajosa added.
Dema-ala, the military spokesman, said the area was “one of the more active remnants of the [guerrilla] front in the central Philippines”.
The rebels “maintain a measure of local support and are able to extort the locals”, he said.
“But because the community had got tired of them, it was the community that helped us identify their location and allowed us to conduct a military operation,” Dema-ala added.
Carbajosa said there had been minor firefights in the past two years in nearby municipalities, but none on the scale of deaths reported in Toboso on Sunday.