MANILA – Seven Philippine soldiers, including an air force colonel, were killed when the helicopter they were flying in crashed in the southern Philippines over the weekend during a hunt for communist rebels.
The military said the helicopter, a refurbished UH-1H vessel from the Vietnam era commonly known as a Huey, was on Saturday with another Huey on a flight to a remote base in Pantaron, a mountainous region in Bukidnon province, flew when it crashed.
“The other helicopter sent radio and told them they were carrying smoke,” said Major General Andres Centeno, the commander-in-chief of the army’s fourth infantry division. “It crashed into an open field.”
No survivors were found when rescuers reached the area.
The soldiers’ names were not released pending their family’s notice, but the highest rank among them was an air force colonel, the army said. Of the other six, three were airmen and three served in the army.
The basis for progress was drawn up as part of a campaign to eventually exterminate the New People’s Army, the armed unit of the Communist Party of the Philippines. The rebel group has been embroiled in a low-intensity conflict with the Manila government since 1969. The rebels’ fighting force is currently estimated at about 5,000 people, compared to a peak of 20,000 spread across the archipelago nation at the height of the uprising in the early 1980s.
The government has ordered intensified operations against the New People’s Army, or the NPA, after the group announced this month that it would revive its urban hit groups to target officials who they believe had committed “crimes against the public”.
The NPA has said it intends to set up “partisan teams” to carry out targeted killings in cities, citing its special partisan units, whose reign of terror swept the country in the 1980s during the corrupt rule of dictator Ferdinand Marcos grabbed.
The most famous victim of the hit group was Colonel James Rowe, a U.S. military adviser and prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict, who was killed in a 1989 trap by an NPA hit group north of Manila.
Saturday’s crash occurred a day after Genl. Gilbert Gapay, commander of the Philippine Army, ordered commanders to step up efforts to dismantle guerrilla movements and eventually end the uprising this year.
“All remaining communist guerrilla fronts will be addressed simultaneously and defeated by the end of 2021,” General Gapay said Friday, adding that continued pressure on the ground has weakened rebel forces.
He said more than 50 guerrilla groups remained scattered across the country but were on the verge of a collapse.
“We have significantly reduced these groups,” he said, adding that he hoped for a complete eradication in the first months of 2021.
The crash Saturday was not the first for a Huey used by the military. In November, a soldier was killed when a helicopter from the same factory crashed while evacuating troops wounded in a battle with Islamic militants.