by Tom Anthony
Elaiza was already out of the Pajero and walking briskly after Sergeant Starke, before Thornton changed his mind. Thornton was eager now to leave Liu and get on with it. He caught up with Elaiza as STAGCOM moved away from Liu’s column. She chugged along beside him, and Pedro slid into file with his three healthy brothers falling in behind them. STAGCOM moved into the jungle and away from Liu and TFD.
Thornton saluted Liu as he passed him, and Liu gave Thornton a wave goodbye, and turned his attention forward. TFD eventually reached a saddle in the mountain range where the province borders met. The road became better and more traveled as they descended, first becoming two ruts that the wheels of the trucks fit exactly, then a packed dirt road. Open coconuts sliced in two were lying alongside the road to dry and become a cash crop for the local residents. As no one owned the land here, the farmers collected the coconuts from the trees that grew wild, and after drinking the coconut water or selling it along the road as fresh buko juice, they husked the nut and chopped it open. The split halves were laid by the road where the farmers could watch the crop to shield it from stray pigs. The white coconut meat would dry in the sun and become copra, one of the few steady sources of cash for the indigenous tribes living in their ancestral domains.
Task Force Davao now consisted of 376 infantry soldiers, hastily organized out of the existing force augmented by two companies from the 603rd Infantry Battalion, usually stationed just west of Davao City. Manila had also promised that more troops would be made available and were on the way by truck up the main road, arriving at least as far as Koronadal by the next afternoon. Liu ordered his troops to dismount, turned the now empty trucks around and sent them back toward Davao City to pick up the additional reinforcements and to bring them up from the rear, joining him later when his main force continued forward. As he advanced slowly in his jeep in the middle of his dismounted troops, the intelligence he had to guide him in ordering an attack was quickly becoming yesterday’s news. He did not know what he was up against: just a Turk with a bag of money and a bunch of Lumads? Certainly more than that now. How many NPA had infiltrated behind him on those curious bicycles, or simply on footpaths, through passes in the high mountain ridges?
Liu and the column, spread out and centered along a dirt road through the marshlands, continued along the sometimes crowded path. The oncoming foot traffic now consisted of local farmers following their carabao and goats along the road, meeting the column of soldiers coming from the opposite direction, both herds constricted by the narrow way. The farmers, in this region a Muslim minority resentful of Christian domination, just looked at Liu in his jeep, smiled pleasantly or gave vacant stares, curious about the column of advancing soldiers and suspicious of their intentions.
Liu’s slow-moving caravan eventually reached lower ground, crossed the bridge on the Banga, and entered the province of Sultan Kudarat in western Mindanao.
24
Sultan Kudarat
The mujahadeen gave Mahir and Lateef more of a welcome than the two had expected. Mahir thought he would be treated as the foreigner he was, but he felt more like family than in many places he had visited in the primitive areas of his own homeland, back in Turkey. Mahir was considered locally to be a member of Abu Sayaf, especially since he accompanied Lateef, a now-famous Abu Sayaf leader, and he enjoyed the status. The village, a cluster of a few dozen palm frond-covered farmers’ huts that might possibly have a name assigned to it on some map, had one muddy road that was the town’s thoroughfare. Sitting in front of the third hut on the left were two women, smiling almost toothlessly, with only a few big white ivories showing when they smiled, picking lice out of each other’s hair with their fingers and a small comb. Mahir watched them as he passed by. It seemed to him that only the women picked out their lice; the men did not bother.
A smoldering, acrid smoke hung over the camp of the other rebel soldiers already there as the Abu Sayaf patrol moved in to join them. The men were burning plastic pipe scraps and old Styrofoam chunks to heat water and cook rice at scattered individual campfire sites. Burning the plastic seemed easier to some of the soldiers than using the dry wood that was lying around them. The smoke smelled distinct from an ordinary wood fire and somehow seemed modern to the new enlistees on their way in. Many of the recruits looked very young, not old enough to shave. Minors were being freely recruited now; their parents had trouble feeding them at home and felt honored when their children were selected to serve. Young women were recruited also, but if they were too young to be used in combat or were not big enough to carry weapons and ammo on long marches, they were delegated to becoming overseas workers or “entertainers,” sold for sex slaves to some foreign brothel after being exported out of Mindanao through Indonesia, a short boat ride the opposite way from where Mahir had entered.
A youngish looking man wearing a red and white head band and quasi-military uniform came out of a hut farther toward the center of the village and approached Mahir, not smiling, and asked, “Have you brought me the money?” The man had recognized the Turk, whose facial features and height set him apart from the others.
“Yes, I have it, less what Lateef has used already,” Mahir said. “I just need a receipt from the proper authority, then no problem.”
“I am not running a government-licensed business here, we do not have accounting records.” Mahir realized he had just met Kumander Ali, the leader of the breakaway Moro Islamic Liberation Front, who stated the obvious.
“A hand-written note from you will be fine, in any language. I need something, your excellency.” Mahir hoped there would not be a problem now, and there was not. Kumander Ali said nothing but came back later with a few short phrases written in English and a few characters in rudimentary Arabic. It would do.
Mahir called up the men who had been carrying the two canvas bags, and passed them on to the man he had recognized from the photograph shown to him back in Damascus. Mahir was relieved that his job was done but pleased when Kumander Ali invited him into his hut with Lateef.
The three squatted on the slatted wood floor. Kumander Ali ripped open a cardboard box and offered warm cans of San Miguel Pilsen beer, recently stolen from a delivery truck.
Ali needed Lateef’s confidence as much as he needed the money from Mahir. The Abu Sayaf represented by Lateef out of Jolo and Basilan were necessary allies for Ali if he wanted to reach his goals in this province, and then in all of Mindanao. He considered what to do next, and whether Mahir, the new guy, could be involved. Other rebel leaders would be joining them to determine how best to work together to leverage the new funds. Ali needed to involve the other factions, and perhaps the Turk would be a useful catalyst; foreigners aroused interest and gave authenticity. Ali wanted full control, and the Turk could help him gain it.
Anxious to return to his family in Turkey, Mahir was focused on getting out of the country as soon as possible, but as he listened to the other two men attempt to find common ground with each other, he thought about how he might be able to make the best out of the situation personally. After all, he had already invested his time in this unusual venture and had taken considerable personal risk. If the wrong Philippine National Police or Army officer got hold of him, he might easily be “shot while trying to escape.” On the other hand, if this bunch of rebels ever found a way to work together, they could create a whole new country for themselves, give it a new name, design their own flag for the next edition of school textbooks to be printed around the world, and he would be one of the few foreigners who could profit under the new regime. It also occurred to him that those twin sisters back near Digos might make good wives for him in this country; he would not need to tell his Turkish wife about it. It was just a thought. He had been away from home for a long time.
Over the next few hours, Commander Aldrin Bumbog, a senior official of the NPA, and a man named Mehmet Al Zein, speaking for the Moro National Liberation Front, showed up at the shack and sat down on its porch. They had never met each other before, although t
hey had heard each other’s name. Ali and his followers had split away from the MNLF the previous year, and Ali became Kumander Ali of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He had broken with the MNLF because he thought Al Zein lacked the spine to fight. But now Kumander Ali was philosophically inclined to get back together with Al Zein, his old rival.
Times were different now. It was a momentous event to have the important leaders of the Mindanao insurgent forces opposing the Manila government gathered together here in this small village. Bumbog and Al Zein had heard about new money coming in and wanted their share. Ali brought one of the canvas sacks out of the hut and gave a stack of hundred dollar notes to each of the men, more money than they had ever seen. There was ten thousand U.S. dollars in each stack, a miniscule portion of what Ali had, but it made them happy. The leaders could satisfy their followers and feed them for months with this windfall. Now the leaders would decide what to do next for the benefit of all.
Kumander Ali started the meeting as the emergent and apparent leader. “We will achieve our freedom, and we can save some of these dollars for better use later. It is easier for us to pay the common soldiers two cans of sardines, or sometimes shrimp paste, every day; it’s cheaper for us, more useful for them and they can sell or trade one of the cans.” In other words, it was easy for them to steal the simple supplies they needed to compensate their troops; they decided to keep the money for better uses.
But Lateef, as the Abu Sayaf representative, pressed to know what the money would be used for, and especially how his band would get their share. After all, the Abu Sayaf was the conduit for the funds. He asked, “Now that we have succeeded and have a victory in sight, we should move boldly. What is your plan, Kumander Ali?”
The idea had occurred to Kumander Ali months before, but this was the first time he verbalized it to anyone. “If we rename ourselves NPA, the New Peoples Army, it would help us unify.” The Moro leader explained their situation. “Despite years of working to uplift the plight of the Bangsomoro peoples, our officials have never worked together. But we have common goals. If we now show we are united, it would demonstrate to Manila that we are also powerful.”
“To the rest of the world, none of you have credibility yet,” Mahir informed them. “It would be useful to show solidarity.”
“OK with me whatever you name this coalition,” Bumbog concurred, speaking in his dialect, “I will not insist on any particular name from our point of view.”
After storytelling and a few self-conscious jokes, Al Zein made the major concession. “It is acceptable to call our combined forces NPA. The MNLF agrees to accept this name. It’s simple, short, and sends a good enough message.”
Ali realized he was witnessing a historic breakthrough, and pressed on. “There is one imperative; we must have an election to gain legitimacy.”
Bumbog joined the confederation with a simple statement. “Then simplicity is best, I too like NPA. It will be easy to remember during an election.”
“Three simple letters are much easier to sell to voters, no matter what their language is,” said Mahir, facilitating the consensus. The Abu Sayaf bosses in Basilan and Jolo would be pleased with his work in the field and would report his success to the Syrian, he hoped. He kept his satisfaction to himself.
Kumander Ali pushed the insurgent leaders to move forward with urgency, still not hinting how much cash he had available, “Within the next several weeks we will have our best chance to get everything we all want.” He had to be careful how he phrased his words because these leaders, and surely most of their followers, were not able to verbalize complex ideas, such as war plans. But they could understand money.
“If you pay ten U.S. dollars per vote, the citizens will show up and check NPA,” said Bumbog, moving the meeting forward again. The others raised their eyebrows and chins simultaneously, a kind of reverse nod indicating an affirmative answer.
“Get all your villages to vote, and we will have a new country, I promise you.” Kumander Ali started to summarize, to see if there would be objections. Silence indicated that the confederacy was formed. Henceforth, they would be known collectively as the NPA, the New Peoples Army.
Mahir now felt he should be free to leave; the newly formed NPA could decide how to spend the money he had turned over to Ali. He had won his personal battle and was confident that the Syrian would transfer the rest of his earthly reward to his account; Ali had already given him the hand-written receipt that the Syrian demanded as verification. All Mahir needed to do now would be to retrace his steps; he could find his way out with no time pressure against him, thinking again that maybe he would have a chance to stop off at that resto-bar along the road where the two sisters worked. To get to the sea he would only need to follow the coast.
But Mahir realized that he was with a team now. He believed in the mission, and he wanted to see his team win. He wanted to be the victor for once in his life, against a worthy opponent, in fact a numerically more powerful one. It would taste good to be one up on his global enemies in economic and religious philosophies, to make up for what had gone on back in Turkey. Maybe he could even wind up owning a fruit plantation or an export business in Mindanao and connect that business back to Istanbul. He would have the cash to invest. His allies here would rather work with him after their victory, he supposed, and they would need some help representing their interests to the world. Wild thoughts began to race through his mind. So he decided that he should stay on for a while and continue on jihad. Victory in the war of theologies would wipe out the Christian missionaries and Jewish businesses; both would be replaced by the new Muslim order.
Kumander Ali, the leader of the reconstituted NPA, took on increased authority with an army in which he would command thousands. As a gesture of thanks, he assigned about fifty men—two truckloads of soldiers—to Mahir to command. Although he had little formal military education himself, Mahir imagined getting his men together for training. After all, he had recent, real combat experience compared to his other subordinates, whose primary activity was limited to the monthly collection of tongs, extortion from miners and loggers who worked in their valleys. The barefoot soldiers assigned to him may have been in some squabbles with the PNP and the AFP, but the most they could boast about was sniping or kidnapping. One man, the most experienced, had held up a hardware store and stolen an M-16 rifle from a PNP officer who was there buying nails for personal use.
Mahir hoped he could organize and lead the men assigned to him to one specific place and get them to shoot their rifles in the same direction: such an outcome would be achieving a high enough level of discipline. Many of them did have rifles. They also had one 60mm mortar tube, two 12-gauge shotguns and several dozen rounds of mortar ammunition. They had never fired the mortars and did not know how, but they carried them everywhere they went. Mahir thought he could figure out how to employ the mortar tube, but then he still would not know how to aim this indirect fire weapon. Maybe someone could figure out how to convert the mortar rounds into car bombs or strategically placed IEDs—individual explosive devices—or to make a dozen coordinated suicide bomb attacks. That would certainly put a big dent in the enemy’s will to fight if the explosions were in the right places, like theaters or churches. He would lose twelve NPA soldiers in the deal, but they were not much good individually anyway, and the NPA could recruit more. He would ask for volunteers who did not have rifles, like the knife carriers or ammo porters. If all they had was a bolo, they were better employed to take a few of the enemy with them in suicide attacks and the while on jihad than to continue their march unarmed.
Since Bumbog and Al Zein had accepted Kumander Ali as their tactical leader in the field, Bumbog decided to test him. “Now that we’re united, what do you recommend we do first?” Bumbog wore an aviator’s flight jacket that he had taken from the dead co-pilot of a downed AFP aircraft and kept the collar turned up to look cool.
Ali had a surprise answer. “I have given it much thought. Suicide attacks have v
alue, but timing is important. At this moment we have the Philippine Army confused. Now is the time for us to do what we have waited for. It is time for us to announce our war. Our next move is tonight. Near here in Itig is a radio station operated by a broadcasting company out of Manila. Tonight, we take the radio station!”
Kumander Ali had already discussed this plan with Lateef and assigned him to be the patrol leader, since he had been in a firefight recently and could do a better job with his experienced cadre than any leader of the raggle-taggle herd of new recruits wandering in who didn’t know each other or even speak the same dialect. It would be difficult to ever forge the motley assemblage into a disciplined combat unit, let alone do it by nightfall. So the task fell to Lateef, who kept the same core team he had brought with him, including Mahir because they had fought together in a successful skirmish, and joined by nine of Ali’s personal security guards, but not Ali himself. The mission to take the radio station was important, but it was grunt work. They made their plan as simple as possible, and it should be easy.
The patrol would also include Ugly Maria. Kumander Ali had ordered her to cover her body, especially her face, at all times whether in the village or on patrol—perhaps not only because of religious tradition—but she refused and told him to go to hell. He didn’t make an issue of it, and none of the others admitted to being offended.
Lateef and the attack squad left the village shortly before 10 PM using four habl habl, motorized tricycles, typical inter-village transportation in the area, to approach Itig town center by road. One tricycle at a time they rolled silently past the AFP checkpoints along the road. The soldiers paid no attention to the numerous and ubiquitous tricycles and stopped only cars and larger vehicles for inspection. They parked on the dirt basketball court, the wide spot in the road in the center of all villages, where the patrol assembled for their mission.
