Marines capture 4th BIFF camp

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines - Marine combatants on Thursday cleared the fourth major enclave of the brigand Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) in southwest of the province.

Occupants of the BIFF encampment in Barangay Tina in Sharif Saidona town, among them adolescents the group had reportedly recruited recently, scampered to different directions as units of the Marines came close.

Officers of the 1st Marine Brigade and the 8th Marine Battalion declared the BIFF lair in Barangay Tina cleared from gunmen by 1:20 p.m. Thursday.

Members of the Sharif Saidona municipal peace and order council said the bandits escaped immediately without a fight after several rounds of mortar landed in the surroundings, which signaled the start of the operations meant to drive them away.

Three BIFF members were wounded when a projectile landed near them, according to barangay officials.

The bandits were seen bringing with them more than a dozen water buffaloes stolen from farms abandoned by owners now in evacuation sites in a school campus in nearby Barangay Libutan in Mamasapano, also in Maguindanao. 

The BIFF-military hostilities from Wednesday until Thursday afternoon in Maguindanao’s adjoining Mamasapano, Sharif Saidona and Salibo towns had swelled by more than 10,000 more the number of evacuees from affected villages.

Lawyer Laisa Alamia, executive secretary of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, said there are already 93,402 evacuees in different relief sites in the second district of Maguindanao as of Friday dawn.

There were only more than 70,000 evacuees from March 1 until last Tuesday in different evacuation centers in the province.

Alamia said ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman directed Friday morning the regional government’s Humanitarian Emergency Assistance and Response Team (HEART) to immediately dispatch three truckloads of relief supplies for the new evacuees.

The HEART and the Anak Mindanao Partylist, led by Rep. Sitti Djalia Turabin-Hataman dispersed last Wednesday more than 30 tons of food supplies to thousands of evacuees in a joint relief mission supported by the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, the provincial government of Maguindanao and the office of Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman.