MANILA, March 26 (Reuters) - Philippine troops overran a major communist guerrilla base in the north after a week-long gunbattle, an army general said on Wednesday, warning of reprisals ahead of a key rebel anniversary at the weekend. Lieutenant-General Rodrigo Maclang, army commander in the northern Philippines, said troops found several assault rifles, an undetermined amount of ammunition and two landmines at the hastily abandoned rebel camp in mountains in Abra province. Soldiers also found the body of one rebel in one of the bunkers and witnesses saw the guerrillas fleeing with some wounded comrades, Maclang added. "We lost two men in the assault and six others were wounded," Maclang told reporters in mobile phone text messages. "We hit the jackpot. We've found a major rebel base deep in the mountains straddling three northern provinces." Maclang said troops stumbled upon the rebel base at the end of an eight-day gunbattle with the communist New People's Army (NPA) guerrillas in Abra on Tuesday. "We're expecting the rebels to retaliate because we probably disrupted their plan to attack army detachments to celebrate the NPA's 39th founding anniversary on March 29," he added. The army claims to have dismantled 13 rebel bases in 2007, reducing the number of communist guerrillas from 7,000 to a little over 5,700 fighters, the lowest-evel level in the nearly 40 years of conflict that has killed 40,000 people. Active in 69 of 81 provinces across the archipelago, the communist rebels have also been engaged in on-off peace talks with government since the late 1980s. The latest round of negotiations were stalled in August 2004 over rights and terrorism issues. Manila has declined to help remove the communist group from terrorist blcklists of the United States and some Western European states. Maclang said security forces had been placed on alert for possible rebel reprisals, particularly remote army and police detachments and less defended municipal halls in the mountain regions. (Reporting by Manny Mogato, editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Sanjeev Miglani)
A farmer harvests rice stalks in Carigara, in the province of Leyte, central Philippines March 22, 2008. For Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, already battling a corruption scandal, the price of ...
