MANILA – Seven Filipino soldiers, including an Air Force colonel, died when the helicopter in which they flew crashed in the south of the Philippines during a weekend hunt for communist rebels.
The military said the helicopter, a reformed UH-1H ship from the Vietnam era commonly known as Huey, was flying on Saturday with another Huey on a supply trip to a remote base in Pantaron, a mountainous region in Bukidnon province, when dropped down.
“The other helicopter informed them that they were smoking smoke over the radio,” said General Andres Centeno, commander-in-chief of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. “He hit an open field.”
No survivors were found when rescue workers arrived in the area, he said.
The names of the soldiers were not released until the notification of their families, but the top echelon among them was an Air Force colonel, the military said. Of the other six, three were aviators and three served in the army.
The advanced operational base was set up as part of a campaign to finally eradicate the New People’s Army, the armed unit of the Philippine Communist Party. The insurgent group has been engaged in a low-intensity conflict with the government in Manila since 1969. The fighting strength of the rebels is currently estimated at around 5,000 people, compared with an increase of 20,000 spread across the archipelago at the height of the insurgency at the beginning 1980s.
The government ordered intensified operations against the New People’s Army, or NPA, after the group announced this month that it was reviving its urban attack squads to attack officers who, he said, had committed “crimes against the public”.
The NPA said it was planning to form “party teams” to carry out targeted assassinations in the cities, in reference to its Special Party Units, whose reign of terror took over the country in the 1980s during the corrupt regime of dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The squad’s most famous victim was Colonel James Rowe, a U.S. military adviser and prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict, who was killed in an ambush by an NPA squad north of Manila in 1989.
Saturday’s accident came a day after General Gilbert Gapay, the head of the Philippine Armed Forces, ordered commanders to step up efforts to dismantle guerrilla movements and finally end the insurgency this year.
“All remaining communist guerrilla fronts will be faced and defeated simultaneously in late 2021,” said General Gapay on Friday, adding that continued pressure on the ground has weakened rebel forces.
He said more than 50 guerrilla groups remain scattered across the country, but are “on the verge of collapse”
“We have significantly wiped out these groups,” he said, adding that he expected complete eradication in the early months of 2021.
The accident on Saturday was not the first of a Huey used by the military. In November, a soldier died when a helicopter of the same brand fell during the evacuation of soldiers wounded in battle against Islamic militants.