Army launches new strike vs Kato
CAMP SIONGCO, Maguindanao , Philippines – The military launched yesterday a new offensive against the renegade Ameril Umbra Kato, sending more than 2,000 soldiers at the marshy border of North Cotabato and Maguindanao to hunt him there.
Gen. Fred Cayton, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said the soldiers will search for the fugitive commander of the 105th Base Command of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front at the tri-boundaries of Midsayap, North Cotabato and the adjoining Kabuntalan and Datu Piang towns, both in Maguindanao.
Kato, a foreign-trained Islamic preacher who once imposed a “Taliban-style” justice system in remote villages in Maguindanao, is wanted for leading bloody attacks on farming communities in Aleosan, North Cotabato in July last year and, subsequently, terrorized more communities in the same province after the aborted Aug. 5 crafting in Malaysia of the memorandum of agreement on ancestral domain by the government and the MILF.
Police action
Cayton said their hunt for Kato is a “police action” against him and his followers and not a tactical maneuver against the MILF as a revolutionary organization.
Lt.Col. Jonathan Ponce, 6th ID’s civil-military relations chief, said Muslim religious and community leaders in villages along the banks of the Rio Grande de Mindanao and Allah River, which separates the marshy areas at the eastern border of Maguindanao and North Cotabato have complained of the unusual convergence the past days of renegade Moro rebels in their surroundings, as if poised to establish new enclaves.
Ponce said two soldiers were wounded when suspected followers of Kato attacked soldiers guarding a bridge in Datu Piang, Maguindanao hours before the 6th ID started fielding soldiers in the banks of the two rivers to drive the rebels away from farming communities where they showed force.
- Latest
- Trending
