The Moro National Liberation Front, the police and military are together trying to disengage two enemy groups locked in a showdown for a week now in Barangay Bagoinged in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte.
Barangay Bagoinged is also known as the MNLF’s largest enclave in Central Mindanao, which is covered by its September 2,1996 final truce with the national government that the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of more than 60 Muslim countries, brokered.
More than 400 Moro families in Bagoinged have fled to neutral grounds after the group led by its barangay chairman, Moner Sepi Kamsa, and the clan of Muslimin Wari Angkanan, who was killed in an ambush last month near the town center of Datu Odin Sinsuat, figured in a series of gunfights last week.
Talks and text messages are spreading around stating that the clashes had exacted fatalities on both sides, but are being kept by their leaders from authorities and the media.
Local executives in Datu Odin Sinsuat had said that relatives of Angkanan have tagged Kamsa’s group as responsible for his fatal ambush last June, which left two of his companions, both related to him by blood, wounded.
Bangsamoro Labor and Employment Minister Muslimin Sema, chairman of the MNLF’s central Committee, and Datu Odin Sinsuat’s newly-elected mayor, Abdulmain Abas, sent emissaries on Sunday, July 13, to reposition the two groups away from each other.
“We are doing our best to prevent escalation of hostilities between the two groups,” Sema told reporters on Monday, July 14.
The commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, Major Gen. Donald Gumiran, and Brig. Gen. Jaysen De Guzman, director of the Police Regional Office-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, had separately said that they are supporting the efforts of the MNLF and the mayor of Datu Odin Sinsuat in resolving the “rido,” which means clan war in local vernaculars, between the group of Kamsa and the Angkanans, who are MILF members.
Traditional Moro elders and Muslim religious leaders Datu Odin Sinsuat, which is near Cotabato City, the capital of BARMM, told reporters on Monday that they will help the MNLF, the 6th ID and the PRO-BAR settle the conflict.
Photo show emergency responders guarding against possible escalation of hostilities between the two enemy groups in Datu Odin Sinsuat, Maguindanao del Norte. (July 14, 2025)