The New People’s Army has committed a total of 1,506 atrocities and International Humanitarian Law violations in the last 10 years beginning 2010, including the abduction of 544 children who were forced to become child warriors – 304 of them boys and 240 girls – according to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
This was revealed by Brig. Gen. Jose Alejandro Nacnac, director of AFP’s Center for Law of Armed Conflict, in the weekly virtual press conference of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).
Nacnac said this proved “a nationwide pattern of organized, orchestrated, continuing, deliberate and systematic scheme perpetrated by the communist terrorist group, which justifies their designation as a terrorist organization.”
He said 464 of the child warriors were rescued by government troops. Of the rescued victims, Nacnac claimed 25 were abused by their NPA captors.
“These are actually reports from our field units – verifiable, with names of these children who were used as child warriors,” Nacnac said.
The highest number of children forcibly taken by the NPA came from Region 11, with a total of 141 incidents.
The AFP also documented and verified some 532 incidents of atrocities where the NPA destroyed civilian properties, the highest number of which occurred in 2017 with a total of 87 incidents, most of which happened in Region 13 (Caraga).
Aside from these grave violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), Nacnac said the NPA also “indiscriminately” used anti-personnel mines – a violation of the Geneva Convention and other international treaties.
The NPA is the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist group founded by Jose Ma. Sison.
In December 2017, President Rodrigo Duterte declared the NPA, along with the CPP, as a terrorist organization.
Both the CPP and the NPA have also been designated as terrorist organizations by the United States since 2002, and by the European Union since 2005.
The Anti-Terror Council of the Philippines designated CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization in December last year.