Families displaced by `rido' in North Cotabato
Mindanao Armed Conflict • 21:00 PM Sat May 2, 2020
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By:
John M. Unson
Some of the displaced families now at Barangay Marbel covered court. (Photo from Mark Anthony Tayco of DXND)
COTABATO CITY --- Hundreds of villagers have fled from interior barangays in Matalam, North Cotabato where two heavily armed Moro groups are locked in a deadly showdown since Wednesday.
Two longtime adversaries, the Ambel clan, identified with the Moro National Liberation Front, and the group of allies Naig Naga and Mail Imbong, both members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, are involved in the internecine gunfights in Barangays Kilada and Marbel in Matalam.
Senior municipal officials on Saturday appealed to the central leadership of the MNLF and the MILF to reposition the feuding factions away from the two barangays to prevent displacement of more villagers.
In a statement Friday, the Police Regional Office-12 said it has tasked the North Cotabato provincial police to support the Matalam municipal government's effort to iron out the dispute through backchannel talks now being initiated by traditional Moro leaders.
The animosity between the rido protagonists escalated with the fatal ambush Wednesday afternoon of Norodin Solaiman Ambel at the border of Barangays Kilada and Marbel.
Ambel was a member of the barangay council in Kilada, an agricultural area in Matalam.
He succumbed to multiple bullet wounds when gunmen fired assault rifles at the red Isuzu pick-up truck carrying him and five companions while traversing the border of Matalam’s neighboring Barangays Kilada and Marbel from another barangay in the same town.
A passenger, Rowela De Leon, chairperson of Barangay Kilada, was seriously wounded in the incident.
Relatives of Ambel attacked on Thursday morning the villages where followers of Naga and Imbong reside, sparking gunfights that immediately spilled over to farming enclaves nearby.
Talks have since been spreading around purporting that the skirmishes exacted casualties on both sides.
The North Cotabato provincial police said the gunmen who perpetrated the ambush the resulted in Ambel’s death set on fire Thursday his bullet-riddled pick-up truck amid heavy exchanges of gunfire in open fields not too far away.
The two groups, politically hostile to each other, have long been squabbling for control of strategic patches of arable lands in Barangay Kilada.