CPP@47 | Mindanao rebels claim expansion despite faceoff with 60% of AFP

From InterAksyon (Dec 26): CPP@47 | Mindanao rebels claim expansion despite faceoff with 60% of AFP




Jorge 'Ka Oris' Madlos speaking at the Mindanao celebration of the 46th anniversary of the CPP last year. (image from http://www.philippinerevolution.net/images/)

Communist rebels on Mindanao said they have expanded their reach in the southern island despite facing off against 60 percent of the government’s military strength.

In a statement marking the 47th anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines on Saturday, Jorge “Ka Oris” Madlos, spokesman of the National Democratic Front-Mindanao, said that the 40 guerrilla fronts in the first year of President Benigno Aquino III’s term, which began in 2010, “have grown to 46 in five regions of Mindanao, “and not one was dismantled despite the ferocity of the attacks” of Oplan Bayanihan, the government’s counterinsurgency program.

And, he added, “from the more than 200 towns and cities where (the rebels) operate, from only 1,850 villages in 2010,” they have expanded to 2,500 villages, with a number of “organs of political power” established up to the “municipal level.”

Madlos also claimed the growth of the rebels’ mass base, from 120,000 in 2010 to the current 200,000.

He said the growth happened despite the government’s deployment of “60 battalions, or more than 60 percent of the total strength of the AFP,” not including the police and the various militias organized by the military, such as the BULIF, Alamara, Gantangan, Bagani, Magahat, and the “Calpet group.”

These militias have been blamed for atrocities against Mindanao’s indigenous people that have driven thousands of lumad from their homes this year.

The expansion of their mass base, said Madlos, had allowed the New People’s Army in Mindanao to increase the number and intensity of tactical operations, from 250 in 2010 to “more than 500” in 2015, inflicting a battalion’s worth of deaths among government forces.

http://www.interaksyon.com/article/121889/cpp47--mindanao-rebels-claim-expansion-despite-faceoff-with-60-of-afp