BIFF retaliations for losses in latest Maguindanao hostilities feared

MAGUINDANAO --- Eight bandits
were killed while seven soldiers were wounded in hostilities this week
in the province, sparked by an attack last Wednesday on an Army team
studying Moro culture in Mamasapano town.Senior members of the
municipal security councils in the neighboring Mamasapano, Datu Unsay
and Shariff Aguak towns on Saturday said there are talks spreading
around purporting that the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) is
now preparing for retaliations, angered by the deaths of eight members
in the encounters.The sources, among them elected officials,
identified the BIFF fatalities as Monib, a certain Boy ISIS,” Odin,
Bansil, Bohari, Nasif, Badrudin and an adolescent named Salik.The
local officials also confirmed that 10 bandits, Tuwah, Runi, Omar,
Tanser, Kasim, Kamar, Kahirudin, Ibrahim, Moctar, and Odih, were wounded
in the gunfights.They told reporters it was the BIFF that
provoked the hostilities, which erupted early Wednesday and waned late
Thursday, dislocating more than 500 ethnic Maguindanaon families.The
BIFF, led by fanatical clerics, among them graduates of religious
universities in the Middle East and North Africa, boasts of its loyalty
to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The skirmishes last
Wednesday escalated when BIFF members fired at soldiers patrolling in
nearby Barangay Meta in Datu Unsay to avenge the deaths of three bandits
killed in their incursions earlier the same day in Barangay Kuloy in
Mamasapano.Seven soldiers, Privates 1st Class Dan Antiporta, Glen
Villanueva, Jason Ojanola, Manolito Tero and Ronnie Angel and Corporals
Mike Encarnacion and Kim Tablasan were wounded in the two-day running
firefights.Evacuees told reporters the BIFF started the trouble
before dawn Wednesday with an attack on Visayan personnel of the Army’s
19th Infantry Battalion dispatched to Barangay Kuloy to study the
culture and religious practices of villagers.The 19th IB,
comprised largely of non-Muslim soldiers from provinces in the Visayas,
arrived in Central Mindanao just before the May 9 synchronized local and
national elections.Capt. Joann Petinglay, spokesperson of the
Army’s 6th Infantry Division, which has jurisdiction over military units
in Maguindanao, said the community immersion activity of the soldiers
from Visayas was only meant to educate them on the social and religious
norms of Maguindanaons. It was never a tactical activity. It was
purely an educational engagement parallel with the religious and
cultural sensitivity policy of 6th ID,” Petinglay said.

The BIFF’s latest attacks at Barangay Kuloy fanned undue apprehensions
among villagers on their safety, worried that the group might persecute
them for helping in the educational program of the soldiers, now
suspended indefinitely. The BIFF is known for harassing and even
executing villagers on mere suspicion of conniving with the military,”
Samad Kusin, a 45-year-old farmer, said in the Maguindanaon dialect.