2 US soldiers killed in Jolo
Attack spurs call for VFA scrapping
By Julie Alipala
Inquirer Mindanao
First Posted 01:02:00 09/30/2009
ZAMBOANGA CITY-Two American soldiers and a Filipino Marine were killed early Tuesday in an explosion that went off as a US military vehicle passed in Barangay Kagay, Indanan, Sulu.
Lt. Col. Romeo Brawner, Armed Forces spokesperson, said a number of American soldiers escorted by Filipino Marines had just inspected a school project in Sitio Laum Saing and were heading back to a Marine detachment in a US Hummer when the explosion occurred at around 8:30 a.m.
He said it was as yet unclear whether the explosive was buried in the road or by the roadside. Two other Filipino soldiers were injured in the blast.
Brawner told reporters in Camp Aguinaldo that the slain Americans were members of the Seabees, the construction battalion of the US Navy.
The Sulu police late Tuesday released the identities of the two American soldiers and the Filipino Marine trooper, who were killed in the blast in Indanan town.
Senior Superintendent Alibuddin Esmail, Sulu police chief, identified the US soldiers as Staff Sergeant Jack Martin and Sergeant First Class Christopher Shaw. The Filipino soldier was only identified as a Private First Class Estrada.
Esmail said the police have yet to identify who was behind the blast.
Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago told reporters that the explosion should prompt the Philippine government to abrogate the RP-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).
“Why are [the Americans] in an area where there are land mines?” said Santiago, who chairs the Senate foreign relations committee.
She said the attack showed that the Americans were in “a conflict or battle area,” and “absolutely” proved that US troops were taking part in Philippine operations against separatist insurgents.
“What else can you conclude?” Santiago said.
Sulu is a known lair of the Abu Sayyaf bandit group which, according to the Philippine military, is coddling operatives of the regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah.
The US Embassy in Manila is “still investigating the incident” that involved an improvised explosive device, according to spokesperson Rebecca Thompson.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack and the Philippine military and police have no suspect as yet, Brawner said in a text message.
Fire fight
Maj. Gen. Ben Dolorfino, chief of the Western Mindanao Command, disclosed that before the explosion, a 45-minute fire fight between government forces and unidentified gunmen occurred in Barangay Bitanag in Panamao, Sulu.
Dolorfino said there was no reported casualty among the troops.
Tuesday’s explosion was the second recent attack involving US forces in Sulu.
In the first, a grenade was lobbed at US troops unloading supplies at the Jolo pier. No one was injured but the incident became controversial because the Americans fired their weapons in the purported direction of the attacker, which was near a mosque.
Temojen Tulawie, the coordinator of the Consortium of Bangsamoro Civil Society in Sulu, said he saw the bodies of the two Americans in a military truck.
“They were white and they wore the usual light brown uniform,” Tulawie said by phone.
“While returning [from Sitio Laum Saing], they passed between Kagay and Bato-bato and that’s where the explosion occurred,” he added.
‘Big slap on VFA’
Sulu police chief Esmail said a red alert had been declared all over the island.
“Although the situation has somehow normalized, we cannot as yet discount the possibility of another attack,” Esmail said.
But two hours after the explosion, suspected Abu Sayyaf bandits bombed a police outpost in Patikul town.
Tulawie said members and officers of various civil society groups in Sulu had been called to an emergency meeting.
He admitted that the situation was worrisome “because this is the first time a US soldier was killed in Sulu, and in an area where there was a fresh fire fight.”
He warned that US and Philippine troops “may launch offensive actions in the area although we still cannot determine who was behind the attack.”
Tulawie also said the attack was “a big slap on the VFA.”
‘Serving others’
In a statement, the US Embassy said the explosion occurred at 8:45 a.m. while the American soldiers were conducting a re-supply mission for a school construction project.
The embassy and the US members of the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines expressed condolences to the families of the killed and wounded.
“They lost their lives serving others and we will always be grateful for their contributions to improve the quality of life on Jolo,” US Ambassador
Kristie Kenney said.
According to Kenney, US forces are temporarily deployed at the invitation of the Philippine government to conduct activities such as training exercises, professional exchanges and civic action projects with the Philippine military.
Land mine around schools?
Told of the US Embassy statement that the American soldiers were in the area to build schools, Santiago was incredulous.
“And Filipinos were so stupid to plant land mines in an area for a school where most of their children would go?” the senator said.
Asked if the incident would drag the US government into the Philippine conflict, she said America became involved “when [it] insisted on the VFA” 10 years ago.
Told further that US troops were arriving to help rehabilitation efforts in the wake of Saturday’s great flood, Santiago said any help was welcome.
But “I humbly contend that this is all part of psy-ops (psychological operations) to gather intelligence,” she said.
Santiago also said she had transmitted to Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo, Ambassador Kenney and the Presidential Commission on the VFA an approved Senate resolution seeking a review or renegotiation of the agreement.
On patrol?
At the House of Representatives, Bayan Muna party-list Rep. Satur Ocampo agreed that the explosion “proves that [the Americans] were in a combat area.”
“What was their mission there? Were they conducting a patrol?” Ocampo said.
He called for an inquiry into the attack, pointing out that the Constitution prohibits foreign troops from operating in combat areas.
Ocampo said the killing of the US soldiers could be a reason for American officials to retaliate against those they believed responsible.
“I am calling on the Americans not to take action,” he said. “The terms of reference of their participation must be clarified first.”
Ocampo echoed calls for a review of the VFA in order, he said, to prevent the Americans’ deeper participation in counterinsurgency operations in the country.
Muntinlupa Rep. Rufino Biazon, vice chair of the House committee on national defense, said the deaths of the US soldiers were a blow to the VFA and could lead to its abrogation.
Biazon said the government should not have sent US soldiers to combat zones where they would be put in the line of fire.
“Because of this incident, the fate of the VFA may have just been doomed. The US troops should be immediately pulled out from the combat zones now. Exercises should be suspended until this is thoroughly investigated,” he said.
‘Noncombatants’
But Brawner said the slain US soldiers were working on “development projects” and were not involved in combat activities.
“The soldiers were in that detachment because of ongoing projects … Specifically, they were working on the 5-kilometer Kagay road,” Brawner told reporters in Camp Aguinaldo.
He said that from information gathered by the Philippine military, the Americans were “noncombatants.”
“They were there to supervise the developmental projects in the area when they were attacked,” he said.
Brawner also said how the explosive was detonated, as well as its composition, was still being determined.
He denied that the explosive was a land mine, the use of which in warfare is banned under the Geneva Convention.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) expressed sadness at the killing of the three soldiers.
“It is with sadness that we learned of the death of a Philippine Marine and two US servicemen. What they were doing in Sulu-assisting Philippine military and local officials in undertaking civic engineering projects, protecting families and securing the peace, for which they paid the ultimate sacrifice-is important to the Filipino people,” DFA spokesperson Ed Malaya said.
With reports from Cynthia D. Balana, Leila B. Salaverria, Christine O. Avendaño and Alcuin Papa in Manila
Source: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20090930-227582/2-US-soldiers-killed-in-Jolo
why the fuck are we in Jolo Gates? you said you want to continue our presence there? for what reason? the fils don’t want us their (including the military) and they take absolutely nothing away from our “smee”. fucking bullshit that two of our guys were killed. its your fault.
p.s. seabees??? wtf
Seabee’s are considered Navy Ground forces. I was over there back in March, April of 09 and met 90% of everyone out there.
We are there to help improve the living conditions and assist the AFP/PNP. Unless you have been there, you wont understand fully what our role is. For one, innocent babys, children, men and women are being kidnapped, raped and beheaded constantly. Second, they live in fear of being bombed and shot everyday. Death and destruction is a common occurance. Corruption is rampant. The people and AFP/PNP do want us there. The ones that dont are committing the horrendous crimes and creating fear. The two American soldiers gave up their lives not only to protect our freedom, but the freedom of others who suffer under these terror groups. They use religious goals as a cover for what they really are, power monguls and murderers. Sadly, I witnessed the result of the attack on them. Their deaths were not in vain, they saw the suffering of innocent people daily and put their lives in danger to do whatever they could to make things better there. So before anyone comments on why we are there and people dont want us, get the full story of what is really happening. I know 1st hand since I spent 6 months there. We need to be there not for our interests, but to give innocent people a chance to leave in peace and not fear everyday.
Having spent nine months on Jolo I can safely say that while some of the locals do appreciate our presence, most are just looking for a handout. And as for “protecting freedom,” the determined insurgents, apathetic locals, and our extremely corrupt, ungrateful allies have created a vicious cycle of violence that isn’t about to be broken by the token force that the US is fielding, especially when one considers how shackled the US forces are by all of the rules (both Filipino and American in origin) that they must abide by. Anyone who thinks that the US military (or any military) should go about propping up corrupt governments in the name of “freedom” is naive in the extreme. I don’t doubt the good intentions of our soldiers (being one myself), but a military is not a charity. It is a taxpayer-funded government agency designed to kill and destroy. As such it’s only legitimate use is defending it’s own country from foreign attacks against its own territory. To paraphrase John Quincy Adams, the people of any given country ought to be that country’s own greatest champions of freedom. In other words, Filipino’s will never be free until they find their own solutions to their problems. Right now all the resources we’re sending their way are ending up in the hands of corrupt government officials and the insurgents themselves. The proper jurisdiction of the US military is the US. For a single US soldier to die on Jolo is a total, tragic waste. Bloodthirsty warlords have ruled Jolo since before the Spanish-American War and will still be there long after the US has given up on this misguided footnote in a misguided war. And anyone who thinks that the Filipino government invited us there of their own free will fails to understand how much pressure the US government put on the Filipino government to do so. Most Filipino elected officials strongly resisted the idea of a foreign military presence in their sovereign nation. But US officials felt a need to “do something” regardless of how ineffective that something might be, and so US forces ended up in harm’s way in a country half way round the world that didn’t really want them there in the first place. Bring the troops home, and God bless America!
Unfortunately the last poster was correct. At best US personnel are tolerated and then only for the Hearts & Minds trinkets,like the colouring books we used to hand out@Bautista on Tuesday nights.VFA is a rotten deal for the Philippines and the US has no business being there. The only positive thing to come out of roughly 8 years of enmeshment is the AFP’s LRF trained on Basilan & that took less than 1 year,and has been finished for more than 6 years already. Pack it in,leave.
I was at the site when that happened, and the Barangay Chairman and his family cried when we were able to get back to the site a month and a half later to finish the project. The PI is a waste of money, despite the locals actually appreciating the 2 school buildings we built there (AND.. they even helped out). I left there in May of this year, and can honestly say that (a) the gov’t is so corrupt there, that generals have family that they ‘fight’ on some of these islands, making any attempt at the Philippines ‘pacifying and stabilizing’ anything over there a worthless endeavor, and (b) their PhilMars (Philippine Marines) are so inept and worthless that there is no point to continue putting money into anything involving training them or arming them, or anything for that matter. The only one to really profit from our having built them schools was Ismael, the contractor that supplied everything for us. If you were there at Bautista, Bud Datu, or anywhere else on Jolo, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Miss Julies sori-sori stand, though.