Insurgency: Historic Insurgency-Free Milestone

The Philippine Army's 10th Infantry Division has declared their territory is now insurgency free. Their area covers the Davao Region which includes 84 cities and municipalities. 

https://www.sunstar.com.ph/amp/story/davao/10id-marks-historic-insurgency-free-milestone

THE Philippine Army’s 10th Infantry Division (10ID) has declared all 84 cities and municipalities under its operational coverage insurgency-free, a milestone that makes the unit the first infantry division in the Philippines to achieve the status, officials said.

The declaration covers areas across the Davao Region and parts of Sarangani, North Cotabato, and Bukidnon, regions that for decades experienced communist insurgency activities.

The announcement was made on Wednesday by Major Ruben Gadut, 10ID spokesperson, during a Davao Peace and Security Press Corps conference at The Royal Mandaya Hotel.

“Technically speaking, all areas under 10ID are now insurgency-free,” Gadut said. “Based on available military data, this appears to make the division the first in the country to declare its entire area of responsibility free from insurgent influence.”

Gadut cited key municipalities cleared of insurgent presence. In Sarangani, these include Malapatan, Glan, Alabel, and Malungon. In Bukidnon, the declaration covers Kibawe, Damulog, Dangcagan, San Fernando, Kitaotao, Maramag, Quezon, and Valencia City. 

In North Cotabato, Antipas and Kidapawan City were among those recognized as insurgency-free.

The declaration reflects years of sustained counterinsurgency operations against the New People’s Army (NPA), which had long maintained guerrilla fronts across parts of Mindanao. Security officials said the achievement builds on earlier milestones in the region.

On March 24, 2022, Davao City was declared insurgency-free after 10ID reported the dismantling of the NPA’s Sub-Regional Committee 5, which had operated in areas surrounding the city. In the months that followed, other provinces issued similar declarations: Davao del Norte and Davao de Oro in June 2022; Davao del Sur in July; Davao Occidental in August; and Davao Oriental in September. These milestones paved the way for the Regional Peace and Order Council to formally declare the entire Davao Region insurgency-free on October 12, 2022.

Progress in Bukidnon, which is partly under 10ID’s operational jurisdiction, unfolded more gradually. Several municipalities achieved insurgency-free status in phases between 2023 and 2025. Notable milestones included Valencia City, declared insurgency-free in October 2025, making it the first city in Northern Mindanao to earn the recognition. Earlier, in March 2025, Kitaotao, a municipality along the Bukidnon–Davao boundary long considered strategic for insurgent operations, was cleared of communist rebels.

The 10ID oversees security operations across a large portion of southern Mindanao, including parts of South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, Davao Region, Sarangani, North Cotabato, and Bukidnon.

Despite the insurgency-free declaration, Gadut said the military will maintain its presence in the affected areas to ensure that security gains are sustained. Brigade-sized units remain ready for deployment should threats or sabotage attempts arise. He added that coordination with local officials continues, with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) working closely with the Philippine National Police (PNP) and local government units to maintain stability.

Authorities also urged residents to remain vigilant and report suspicious activities to prevent a resurgence of insurgent groups.

Military officials said the declaration forms part of the government’s broader strategy to stabilize historically conflict-affected areas of Mindanao, strengthen community security, and create conditions conducive to economic development and investment in the region.

Technically speaking?? What does that mean? The military will maintain a presence to prevent a resurgence? Huh? I thought it was insurgency free?  As we shall see insurgency free does not mean zero insurgents.

The AFP has given another update as to how many Reds and supporters have surrendered since the beginning of the year. 

https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1270807

Around 413 New People’s Army (NPA) rebels and their supporters were reported “neutralized” by government troops from Jan. 1 to March 5, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) said late Tuesday afternoon.

In an interview with reporters, AFP spokesperson Col. Francel Margareth Padilla said out of the 413 communist insurgents and supporters “neutralized,” 398 opted to surrender, while seven were captured and nine were killed in military operations.

"Neutralized" is a military term which refers to the surrender, capture, or killing of enemy troops.

“That tells us that sustained pressure, combined with reintegration programs and development initiatives, is creating a pathway - away from the armed struggle,” she said.

“And when more individuals choose reintegration over conflict, it means the security landscape is gradually stabilizing,” she added.

For the same period, around 234 assorted firearms were either seized or captured from communist insurgents along with 68 anti-personnel mines and 14 camps.

Last year, the military said its units have neutralized 2,018 NPA members and supporters from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2025. Of this number, 1,798 have surrendered with 93 arrested, and 127 killed in various military operations nationwide.

"A total of 1,134 firearms and 531 anti-personnel mines were either seized or surrendered (during this period)," the AFP said. It also added that a total of 149 NPA encampments were also captured from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 of last year. 

But they don't break down the numbers between actual NPA members and mere supporters so once again the number is worthless to gauging the strength of the communist insurgency. 

The amnesty application date is drawing nigh and in Bicol 700 former rebels have applied.  

https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1270798

A total of 719 former rebels in the Bicol Region have applied for the government amnesty program, according to the Local Amnesty Board Secretariat of the National Amnesty Commission (NAC) on Wednesday.

Philipp Listanco, NAC regional director, urged eligible former and active rebels to apply before the deadline on Friday (March 13).

"When applying for amnesty, all you need is yourself and any valid identification card. That is all we require. But the decision to apply for amnesty must come from the person," he said in an interview.

"We are not forcing anyone. We continuously encourage them so they can decide for themselves. They must decide on their own that they want to ask for forgiveness from the government so they can have a second chance to live a happy life in our country."

Listanco said that as of the latest count, the nationwide total has reached about 11,000 applications.

He added that the government has so far approved 16 amnesty applications. Of this number, 15 were granted to members of the Communist Party of the Philippines–New People's Army–National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF) in Mindanao, while one was granted to a commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

"Our hope is strong, and the chances of approval are high, but at this moment we are focused on the last days of the application period," he said.

The government's amnesty program is intended for former rebels who have legal cases related to acts committed in pursuit of their political beliefs. Qualified applicants may be granted amnesty, allowing them to reintegrate into mainstream society without prosecution for their past offenses.

Listanco said the commission has already requested an extension of the application period.

It seems the insurgency is dying and defeated. But hold on. That may only be government propaganda. The South China Morning Post has a lengthy article about the subject. 

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3345929/philippines-says-its-communist-rebels-are-defeated-are-they

The mountains of the Philippines are quieter now.

The jungle bases that once sustained Asia’s longest-running communist insurgency are mostly emptied out. Its tens of thousands of guerrilla fighters have been reduced, by the military’s account, to something “very, very negligible”.

After 56 years, the Philippine military thinks the fight is almost over – and that conviction is transforming the armed forces from the inside out.

Commanders are overhauling training and strategy, moving away from the small-unit counter-insurgency missions that defined five decades of jungle warfare. The enemy they are preparing for now is not a Maoist guerrilla in the hills.

Officials say this shift is only possible because the New People’s Army (NPA) – the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines – is a spent force.

Not everyone believes it.

Military officials announced the dismantling of the final NPA guerrilla front last month.

A “front” is not merely a band of fighters. It is, according to Philippine Army commander Lieutenant General Antonio Gustilo Nafarrete, a self-contained structure combining armed combatants, political leadership and a civilian support “mass base”.

Dismantling the last one, in the military’s view, marks the end of the NPA as an organised territorial force.

“We’re already near the finish line,” Nafarrete said on February 16. He declined to give a figure for the NPA’s current strength but said it was “very, very negligible”.

I must have missed the fact that the last guerrilla front was dismantled last month. I try to stay on top of the news but this slipped by somehow. Regardless, that doesn't meant the NPA has been defeated. 

The strategic implications are already being felt in training priorities. “Training and capability build-up will be more on large-scale operations,” Nafarrete said.

“Before, we used to do small unit exercises because of our ISO [internal security operations], but now we are already doing brigade to division-size operations in consonance with our territorial defence operations.”

He was careful to add that hard-won ground would not be abandoned. Even as the army pivoted outward, “the position of our forces will stay the same”, Nafarrete said.

“We want to sustain the gains.”

What is this talk about sustaining the gains? Either they are defeated or they aren't. 

To truly appreciate how dramatically the NPA has contracted, it helps to remember how formidable it once was.

At its height in the mid-1980s, during the dying years of Ferdinand Marcos Snr’s dictatorship, the communist rebellion fielded roughly 20,000 armed guerrillas and claimed the sympathy of more than a million Filipinos.

The movement had grown powerful enough that then defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile conceded publicly in 1986 that communist forces were approaching a point where they could threaten Manila itself.

But there was always more to the insurgency than just the guerrillas in the hills.

In 1973, the Communist Party created the National Democratic Front (NDF), a coalition of leftist organisations straddling the legal and the clandestine, to give the revolution a civilian face.

That structure did its job for a long time. As recently as 2018, party founder Jose Maria Sison claimed, from exile in the Netherlands, that the NPA still operated more than 100 guerrilla fronts across 73 of the Philippines’ 81 provinces, with a party membership of around 100,000

Shortly before his death in exile in 2022, he insisted that the movement would “outlive” him and said it had planted deep-penetration agents inside the military.

The government designated the NDF a terrorist organisation in 2021.

The NDF’s representatives in the Netherlands did not respond to a request for comment from This Week in Asia.

For all its reach, however, the movement never managed to translate this into lasting territorial control. Despite decades of guerrilla warfare from mountain and forest bases, the NPA never held a province, or even a city.

That the NPA never held a province or city is very important. The same cannot be said for the Muslim insurgency.  

Ronald Llamas, a former presidential adviser on political affairs and now chairman of Galahad Consulting Agency, offered a three-part diagnosis of the insurgency’s undoing.

The first was political. “Armed struggle grows or weakens depending on democratic space,” he said. “If there is democratic space, then the logic for armed struggle vanishes.”

As the Philippines consolidated its democratic institutions post-Marcos Snr, the NPA’s core recruiting argument – that the system could not be changed from within – grew steadily harder to sustain.

The second reason was ideological. “Their ideological construct, which is Maoism, isn’t even in China any more,” Llamas said. “The ideology has been dramatically weakened.”

A movement that once drew its legitimacy from a global revolutionary current found itself adrift as that current dried up.

The third is technological – and this has been the most lethal. Satellite imaging, facial recognition software and electronic surveillance have granted the Philippine military a precision it never previously possessed

Suspected NPA chief Benito Tiamzon and his wife Wilma, the communist party’s apparent secretary general, were killed in a military operation in 2022.

For an organisation whose survival depended on secrecy and mobility, the loss of both has proved fatal.

But the insurgency has defied being administered its last rites before.

Satur Ocampo, 86, co-founded the NDF, negotiated its first peace talks with the government and spent more years in a Marcos Snr-era prison cell than any other political detainee.

If anyone has earned a view on whether the insurgency is dying, it’s him. His verdict? It isn’t.

“You can’t say it’s nearly dead,” he told This Week in Asia. “It’s true that they have practically massacred the top leadership some time ago. But a movement like this is rooted in several areas that have been fully cleared. They’ve declared a lot of areas cleared of insurgency. But again, particularly in Negros, there’s a resurgence.”

In a protracted conflict, no one side could unilaterally declare it finished, said Ocampo, who described himself as “a progressive social-political activist since the 1960s”.

“You cannot definitely say [it’s over] until the revolutionary forces declare whether they are giving up or are really wiped out.”

He was candid, too, about the movement’s own costly miscalculation: its misreading of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, who had cultivated ties with the NPA over decades before unleashing an all-out military campaign once in office.

The communists had been “nakuryente”, Ocampo said – fooled. “I realised that this guy is balimbing (a turncoat) with no deeply held principles,” he said.

The logic Duterte offered was simple, if brutal: past friendships had limits. He was now president. The law would be enforced. “It’s no longer the same as before,” Ocampo said.

As for the future, Ocampo’s prognosis was bleak for those hoping that the silence in the hills would hold.

So long as “exploitative and oppressive” conditions persisted – in the countryside, in the mining zones where indigenous communities were being pushed from their land – he said there would be people willing to fight on.

“Particularly the youth,” he said. “Armed, unarmed, legal and underground, then let the course proceed until the issues are resolved.”

Still, Ocampo said the movement would be open to a negotiated peace, if the government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr showed any appetite for talks.

The Philippine Communist Party’s Central Committee said in a statement posted to its website on December 26 that conditions were “excellent for further advancing the people’s democratic revolution” – citing a deepening economic crisis, the continuing repression of farmers and factory workers and the militarisation of the countryside.

The movement had “reviewed our experiences and critically identified our weaknesses and errors”, it said.

Even within the Philippine military, there are those who acknowledge that guns can only do so much.

One general who agreed to speak to This Week in Asia on condition of anonymity was frank about his feelings towards the NPA: they had tried to kill him in the southern Philippines and the memory had not faded.

But personal animosity was not a strategy, he said.

“Misgovernance by local government officials is rampant in areas where rebels thrive,” he said. “The military tries to do what it can in fulfilling some of the people’s needs, like drinking water and roads. The military can easily take over governance, but we don’t want to do that. That’s not our constitutional role.”

The solution, he concluded, had to be political.

In the end, it is the one point on which soldier and revolutionary can agree.

The mountains may be quieter now. But silence, as five decades of Philippine history have shown, is not the same as peace – and an insurgency that has already outlasted seven presidents may yet have more patience than the people trying to end it.

It's a rather lengthy article but all one needs to do is cite the AFP who say there will never be a zero insurgency status. 

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1824876/insurgency-to-end-during-bongbong-marcos-term-says-ano

"We will finish this local armed Communist conflict. And from there, we will support just the developments and we will be certain about the delivery of services."

"What we can see in the term of President Ferdinand R Marcos Jr., finally it will be ended."

National Security Adviser (NSA) Eduardo Año made these statements in a briefing in Malacañang, as he talked about the rebellion of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army.

Año admitted insurgency cannot be totally eliminated, but he believes the issue may be brought down to a negligible point.

“While we may not be able to attain this zero insurgents, but at least reduced to an irrelevant number that will not cause concern for peace and order,” he said.

“They will become isolated and just become bandits, because of lost ideology and non-support from the people,” he projected.

The AFP will instead reduce the insurgency to mere bandits. Banditry is still a threat.

https://mb.com.ph/2026/03/10/p7-m-heavy-equipment-torched-in-himamaylan-city

Authorities are probing the burning of six heavy equipment worth a total of P7 million in a farm in Hacienda Baling, Barangay Libacao, Himamaylan City, Negros Occidental on Sunday, March 8.

The Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP)-Himamaylan reported that three cane loaders and two tractors were completely destroyed while another tractor was partially damaged.

Police investigation revealed that a farm manager conducting a late-night inspection on Sunday noticed a fire starting from a tractor parked near the fuel storage area inside the compound.

The flames quickly spread to nearby agricultural equipment. Firefighters declared fire out at around 1:50 a.m. on Monday, March 9. No injuries were reported.

The New People’s Army (NPA) has claimed responsibility for the burning. They accused the agricultural farm of exploiting farm workers who allegedly are paid very low wages.

Despite this claim, the BFP said it has not yet determined if the incident will be officially classified as arson.

Arson investigators have submitted specimens to the fire laboratory to establish the exact cause of the blaze.

The NPA has taken the blame for burning this equipment. What if they burned down BPO's who also use cheap Filipino labor? Have they ever though of that?

The war against the DI continues as 295 grenades were recovered from an arms cache. 

https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1270890

Government troops recovered 295 grenades from an arms cache believed to be hidden by remnants of the Dawlah Islamiya-Maute Group (DI-MG) in the hinterlands of Lanao del Sur, the military said Thursday.

Maj. Gen. Yegor Rey Barroquillo Jr., 1st Infantry Division commander, said troops of the Army's 55th Infantry Battalion (55IB) discovered the cache Wednesday in Barangay Piagolongan, Marogong, Lanao del Sur.

"The sheer volume of explosives recovered—nearly 300 hand grenades in a single cache—represents a significant blow to the operational capacity of the threat group in the area," Barroquillo said in a statement.

"Their removal from circulation directly translates to lives protected, communities secured, and the prevention of potential mass casualty attacks," he added.

Barroquillo said the community played a significant role, with their cooperation and trust in the security forces leading to the discovery and recovery of the cache.

"This act of civic courage reflects a meaningful shift in the communities of Lanao del Sur towards a growing preference for peace over the presence of instruments of conflict in their midst," he said.

He commended the 55IB troops and the community for their collective effort, emphasizing that operations of such magnitude are made possible by the trust and cooperation between the military and the people it serves.

Barroquillo said they remain steadfast in their mission to dismantle terrorist networks, recover hidden war materiel, and ensure lasting peace and security in Western Mindanao.

If they have nearly 300 had grenades in secret what do they have in hand!?