MANILA // Under cover of darkness, 40 Filipino peacekeepers made a daring escape after being surrounded and under fire for seven hours by Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights, Philippine officials said yesterday.
“We may call it the greatest escape,” Philippine military chief General Gregorio Pio Catapang said.
The peacekeepers became trapped after Syrian rebels entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone between Syria and Israel this past week, seizing 44 Fijian soldiers and demanding that their Filipino colleagues surrender. The Filipinos, occupying two UN encampments, refused and clashed with the rebels on Saturday.
The first group of 35 peacekeepers was then successfully escorted out of a UN encampment in Breiqa by Irish and Filipino forces on board armoured vehicles.
The remaining 40 peacekeepers were besieged at the second encampment, called Rwihana, by more than 100 gunmen who rammed the camp’s gates with their lorries and fired mortar rounds. The Filipinos returned fire.
At one point, Syrian government forces fired artillery rounds from a distance to prevent the Filipino peacekeepers from being overwhelmed, said Col Roberto Ancan, a Philippine military official who helped monitor the standoff from Manila and mobilise support for the besieged troops.
“Although they were surrounded and outnumbered, they held their ground for seven hours,” Gen Catapang said, adding that there were no Filipino casualties. “We commend our soldiers for exhibiting resolve even while under heavy fire.”
As night fell and a ceasefire took hold, the 40 Filipinos fled with their weapons, travelling across the chilly hills for nearly two hours before meeting up with other UN forces, who escorted them to safety early on Sunday.
During the siege, the Philippine secretaries of defence and foreign affairs, along with the country’s top military brass, gathered at military headquarters in Manila to communicate with the Filipino forces and help guide them out of danger. The Syrian and Israeli governments, along with the United States and Qatar, provided support, the Philippine military said.
“If they held their ground, they could have been massacred because they were already running low on ammunition,” the defence secretary Voltaire Gazmin said. “So we discussed with them the option of escape and evasion.”
Philippine military officials believed there may have been rebel casualties in the fighting in Rwihana. Philippine president Benigno Aquino, Mr Gazmin said, praised efforts that brought the Filipino peacekeepers to safety but wanted to be sure they could not be targeted by rebel retaliatory attacks.
The Filipinos escaped during the ceasefire because they refused to agree to surrender as the insurgents demanded, Philippine military spokesman Lt Col Ramon Zagala said.
The clashes erupted after Syrian rebel groups – including Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat Al Nusra – overran the Quneitra crossing on the frontier between Syrian- and Israeli-controlled parts of the Golan on Wednesday, seizing 44 Fijians.
The SITE Intelligence Group reported that Al Nusra took responsibility for detaining the Fijian peacekeepers. The group said that the Fijian detainees “are in a safe place, and they are in good health, and that we have given them what they need of food and treatment”.
Al Nusra also posted a photo showing what it said were the captured Fijians in their military uniforms along with 45 identification cards, SITE said.
The Fijians were seized, Al Nusra said, in retaliation for the UN’s ignoring “the daily shedding of the Muslims’ blood in Syria” and even colluding with Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s army “to facilitate its movement to strike the vulnerable Muslims” through a buffer zone in the Golan Heights.
The SITE report could not be independently confirmed.
* Associated Press