Soldiers win back villages from BIFF

NORTH COTABATO, Philippines - Soldiers on Sunday dawn regained control of villages in Pikit, North Cotabato which the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) occupied for one week, an Army official said Monday.

The BIFF bandits were forced out after the Army’s 7th Infantry Battalion (IB) pounded their positions with artillery as soldiers with night vision devices crawled near and engaged them in running firefights.

Evacuees from Pikit’s five barangays where the BIFF showed force have confirmed that five bandits were killed while seven others were injured in the two-day military bombardment.

Lt. Col. Audie Edralin, commanding officer of the 7th IB, said their action against the marauding BIFF gunmen, whose intrusion last week into several barangays at the border of Pikit and Pagalungan town in Maguindanao dislocated thousands of villagers, was calibrated well to prevent civilians from getting caught in the crossfire.

He said their “police action” against the bandits was coordinated with both the municipal peace and order council and the joint ceasefire committee of the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

"It was a law enforcement operation done with the help of the police and patriotic public officials," Edralin said.

The BIFF, founded in 2010 by radical cleric Ameril Ombra Kato, is not covered by the government-MILF 1997 Agreement on General Cessation of Hostilities.

Edralin said the local government unit of Pikit and the 7th IB will start initiating this week the return of the evacuees from the conflict-stricken barangays.

The BIFF bandits had burned down more than a dozen shanties of poor Maguindanaon peasant families in Barangay Kalbugan in Pagalungan.

Edralin said the office of North Cotabato Gov. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza and Pikit’s local government units have jointly been providing relief and rehabilitation services to the villagers driven from their homes by the BIFF attacks.

Mendoza, chair of the inter-agency provincial peace and order council, said employees of the North Cotabato local government’s social welfare and health offices are now in relief sites in Pikit watching over the evacuees.