U.S. troops will patrol in RP, but carefully
U.S. troops will patrol in RP, but carefully
Agencies, Zamboanga, Philippines
U.S. forces will patrol in the southern Philippines with local troops fighting Moro guerrillas but only in areas with a low risk of combat, a Philippine military spokesman said on Sunday.
The patrol areas -- part of joint training exercises due to get underway on Jan. 30 -- will be carefully selected with the aid of sophisticated U.S. intelligence systems, Major Noel Detoyato told Reuters.
"We will see to it that the area where they will go to is where the threat level is low, not where we think the enemy would be," Detoyato said in an interview at the headquarters of the southern Philippine military command.
"That's the condition," Detoyato said.
Philippine officials have given conflicting statements about whether the U.S. troops will go out in the field as part of the exercises.
The U.S. troops will be armed and allowed to fire in self- defense and many critics have said that is highly unusual in any training.
Critics have said the government is using the training to mask a deployment of U.S. troops in a combat role, which would be against the constitution.
Popular support for U.S. troops joining Filipino soldiers in anti-terrorist military operations is overwhelming, with communists the only dissenters, President Gloria Arroyo said on Sunday.
"Our people support this wholeheartedly," Arroyo told Bombo Radio here in an interview.
"Only a few people object to their presence, particularly the communists."
Leftist groups have warned against escalating the U.S. military presence to wage war on a 33-year old communist insurgency.
Asked about the possibility that U.S. troops accompanying local forces might be ambushed by the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas, Detoyato said: "That's part of (being a soldier) but that element is from zero to nil."
About 660 U.S. soldiers will take part in the training but only about 120 to 160 members of the U.S. elite Special Forces will actually go out with local soldiers into Basilan island, where the Abu Sayyaf extremists have been holding a U.S. missionary couple hostage for eight months.
The deployment of the U.S. forces on Basilan, a rugged island of mountains, forests and steep ravines three times the size of Singapore, marks the first significant military involvement of the United States in the Philippines since the closure of the last U.S. military base in the former U.S. colony in 1992, which ended almost a century of U.S. military presence.