COTABATO CITY — The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), the police and military are working to disengage two enemy groups locked in a showdown for a week now in Barangay Bagoinged in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte.
Barangay Bagoinged is also known as the MNLF’s largest enclave in Central Mindanao, which is covered by its Sept. 2, 1996 final truce with the national government that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of more than 60 Muslim countries, brokered.
More than 400 Moro families in Bagoinged have fled to neutral grounds after the group led by its barangay chairman, Moner S. Kamsa, and the clan of Muslimin W. Angkanan, who was killed in an ambush last month near the town center of Datu Odin Sinsuat, figured in a series of gunfights last week.
Talks and text messages are spreading around stating that the clashes had exacted fatalities on both sides but are being kept by their leaders from authorities and the media.
Relatives of Mr. Angkanan have pointed to Mr. Kamsa’s group as responsible for his fatal ambush last June, which left two of his companions, both related to him by blood, wounded.
Bangsamoro Labor and Employment Minister Muslimin G. Sema, chairman of the MNLF’s central Committee, and Datu Odin Sinsuat’s newly elected mayor, Abdulmain P. Abas, sent emissaries on Sunday, to reposition the two groups away from each other.
“We are doing our best to prevent escalation of hostilities between the two groups,” Mr. Sema told reporters on Monday.
The commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division (ID), Major Gen. Donald M. Gumiran, and Brig. Gen. Jaysen C. De Guzman, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region (PRO-BAR), had separately said that they are supporting the efforts of the MNLF and the mayor of Datu Odin Sinsuat in resolving the “rido,” clan war in local vernaculars, between the two groups.
Traditional Moro elders and Muslim religious leaders Datu Odin Sinsuat, which is near Cotabato City, the capital of BARMM, told reporters on Monday that they will help the MNLF, the 6th ID and the PRO-BAR settle the conflict. — John Felix M. Unson
