Army to honor fallen soldiers

COTABATO CITY (Sept.12/NDBC) --- The military will award posthumous citations to two Moro soldiers killed in Thursday’s attempt by the outlawed Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) to simultaneously takeover Army detachments in Midsayap, North Cotabato.The fatalities, Privates First Class Merham Dalimbang and Marlie Kalilangan, both Muslims, belong to the Army’s 40thInfantry Battalion, a component unit of the Army’s 6thInfantry Division.Six soldiers, Sergeants Jose Navarro and Dante Alfonso, Corporal Darwin Timbang, and PFCs Jeffrey Daza, Ronnie Abas and Melron Balolong, were badly wounded in the ensuing encounters. These two slain soldiers fought for peace and ended up as martyrs so they deserve corresponding awards for their gallantry and dedication,” said Col. Dickson Hermoso, spokesman of 6thID.The BIFF attacks on the detachments of the 40th IB in Barangay Polomogen in Midsayap and Makabimban District in nearby Northern Kabuntalan town in Maguindanao forced more than a thousand Visayan and Moro families to evacuate to safer areas.Hermoso said the Army-BIFF firefights erupted when bandits encircled the detachments and opened fire with assault rifles and B-40 anti-tank rockets.The soldiers manning the detachments returned fire, preventing their attackers from breaching the perimeter fences of their positions. Three bandits were reportedly killed in the initial exchanges of gunfire.Another group of bandits blocking the road connecting the town proper of Midsayap to the detachments that came under fire ambushed an approaching truck carrying responding soldiers, provoking a 30-minute encounter, which resulted to the deaths of Dalimbang and Kalilangan.The two soldiers are sons of former guerillas of the Moro National Liberation Front, which signed a peace pact with government on September 2, 1996.Supt. Reinante Delos Santos, Midsayap municipal police chief, said the fleeing bandits planted powerful improvised explosive devices along their escape routes. Good enough barangay folks discovered the IEDs enabling government bomb experts to deactivate them promptly,” Delos Santos said.Barangay officials confirmed seeing seven dead BIFF bandits being carried away by their companions that scampered toward Datu Piang town in Maguindanao after the soldiers started firing 81 millimeter mortars to prevent them from closing in.Hermoso said the 6thID received feedback from local folks that three other bandits succumbed to gunshot wounds while being carried to a makeshift BIFF clinic at the swampy border of Midsayap and Datu Piang.The BIFF, which splintered form the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in 2010, is not covered by the government-MILF 1997 Agreement on General Cessation of Hostilities. The group, which is fighting for an Islamic state, is opposed to the creation of a Bangsamoro self-governing entity based on the final peace accord between the government and the MILF, the March 27, 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on Bangsamoro.