COTABATO CITY, Philippines — The Army’s 33rd Infantry Battalion has deployed troops in Barangay Pagangan in Aleosan, Cotabato to prevent a repeat of the clashes in the area between two Moro groups, where gunmen from one side burned down a dozen houses amid their gunfights Thursday, November 12.
Local officials and traditional Moro datus in the municipality told reporters on Saturday that three from each clan, armed with assault rifles and 40-millimeter grenade launchers and both identified with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, were wounded in their exchanges of gunfire then in Sitio Tubak in Barangay Pagangan.
Barangay and municipal officials had reported that gunmen from one of the two groups set on fire 12 houses and makeshift shelters at the scene of the encounter, made only of semi-permanent materials, before they scampered away when they sensed that more heavily armed men from the other side were closing in.
Mayor Eduardo Cabaya, chairperson of the multi-sector Aleosan Municipal Peace and Order Council, has condemned the incident and urged the two enemy clans to have the deep-seated animosity between them settled amicably.
Cabaya, in a written statement forwarded late Friday to media outlets in Central Mindanao, said one of the two enemy clans is led by Montaser Palencia and the other by Ismael Macasasa, both members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
Cabaya said their heavy exchanges of gunfire in Sitio Tubak in Barangay Pagangan sent hundreds of innocent villagers, among them children and elderly folks, running for their lives.
Local executives and Moro datus in the municipality separately told reporters on Friday that the two clans clashed on Thursday after the fatal ambush early Tuesday of two boys from one side, a Grade 3 pupil and his relative, a Grade 7 student, at a stretch of a highway in Barangay Pagangan.
The two minors, both related by blood to members of one of the two rival clans, were riding a motorcycle together, one way somewhere, when they were waylaid by gunmen at a stretch of a highway in Barangay Pagangan, killing them both instantly.
The incident was preceded by a similar attack, a day before, in Barangay Dalingaoen in nearby Pikit, Cotabato that left a farmer, Norhan Mangulamas and his 12-month-old son both dead.
Mangulamas, who belonged to the other clan, was driving his tricycle, proceeding to Aleosan along with his son and wife, when gunmen positioned along the route opened fire and ran away. He and his son both died instantly from bullet wounds sustained in the attack, which left his wife seriously wounded, now confined to a hospital.
Local executives and Moro community leaders in Aleosan, officials of the Army’s 33rd Infantry Battalion and their superiors in the 602nd Infantry Brigade are together trying, along with counterparts in the Cotabato Provincial Police Office, to reconcile the two enemy clans, separately led by Palencia and Macasasa.
Local executives said four from each clan, or a total of eight persons, were killed in hostilities between the two sides in the past three years.