5 wounded in MILF offensive in southern Philippines

COTABATO CITY, Philippines (Mindanao Examiner / June 24, 2009) - Suspected Moro rebels attacked a village in the southern Philippines and wounding 5 people as fighting continue in the troubled region of Mindanao, officials said.

Officials said Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels fired mortars on Tuesday afternoon at an army detachment in the village of Santa Clara in Sultan Kudarat’s Kalamansig town.

There were no reports of military casualties, but one mortar shell exploded near a school, wounding a woman, said Colonel Jonathan Ponce, a spokesman for the Army’s 6th Infantry Division.

He said a group of policemen, who rushed the injured civilian to the hospital, were also ambushed by rebels on their way back home, wounding four of them.

“The MILF is now very desperate, even shelling civilian communities and clearly shows that the MILF leadership remains futile as they can no longer control their forces in the ground,” Ponce told the Mindanao Examiner.

The MILF claimed responsibility for the attack on the army detachment, saying, it was in retaliation to government offensive against the rebel group. It said the woman injured in the attack is wife of an army soldier.

“Rebels targeted only the detachment, which is being used as a springboard to attack MILF targets in the town. There was no school near the detachment,” Eid Kabalu, a senior MILF leader, said in a separate interview.

Kabalu said they were still investigating the attack on the policemen. “We still don’t know who were behind the attack, but the policemen were injured in a bomb explosion in the village of Cadiz, which is far away from where the rebels attacked the army detachment,” he said.

The MILF is the Philippines’ largest Muslim rebel group which is fighting for self-determination in the troubled South. (Mindanao Examiner)