BUHAY Ponyeta

ALYSSA ALANO AND THE 'ACCIDENTAL SOLDIERS'

I keep coming back to Kilcullen.

If you haven't read David Kilcullen's "The Accidental Guerrilla," the core idea is simple: when a military intervenes too hard in a community, people who don't care about ideology end up fighting alongside insurgents anyway. Not because they support the cause. Because the soldiers showed up in their backyard and became the more immediate problem. The intervention creates the resistance. I've turned this over in my head a hundred times because it maps onto things I've seen.

So the Toboso encounter caught my attention. April 19. Troops of the 79th IB hit the NPA's Northern Negros Front in Brgy. Salamanca. Twelve-hour running firefight. Nineteen neutralized, including Roger Fabillar and most of the NNF leadership. Twenty-four fi****ms recovered. One soldier wounded, stable.

That's a staggering result. And I kept wondering how.

Because here's the thing about counterinsurgency that people who've never done it don't always get: firepower is the easy part. The hard part is knowing where to point it. You can have all the battalions you want. Without ground-level intelligence, you're walking blind. And that kind of intelligence only comes from one place. People.

Then I read the AFP's statement and it just clicked.

"The operation was launched based on verified reports from civilians on the presence of armed elements in the area."

Col. Dema-ala was more blunt: "The AFP did not hunt people. It responded to the community's own call for protection."

The civilians called it in.

In Negros, where the NPA has operated for decades. Where the insurgency grew out of real, legitimate grievances over land and labor. The people in those communities picked up the phone and told the Army exactly where the armed group was.

And once you understand why, Kilcullen's framework flips.

If bad military operations create accidental guerrillas, then what the NPA has been doing in Negros created something I'd call accidental soldiers. Ordinary people who wanted nothing to do with this war, who have no love for the state, who just wanted to farm and raise their kids. But the NPA terrorized them so badly that cooperation with the military became the lesser evil.

The numbers are ugly. Since January 2025, the CPP-NPA has killed at least 45 civilians in Negros through spy-tagging. The pattern is always the same: brand someone a "military informant," drag them through a kangaroo "people's court," then execute them. No evidence needed. No defense allowed.

And the victims aren't combatants. They're your neighbors.

Elbrito Ancero, 51. Shot while feeding his cow. Johnny Boy Dela Fuente, 35. Killed 900 meters from his son's school, minutes after dropping the kid off. Maricel Pantajo, 34, a purok chairwoman. Five gunmen showed up at her house, told her family to go inside, and shot her outside. She had three children. Ariel Calumboy, a kagawad, shot at 5 AM on his own doorstep. Leonora Anguit, 74 years old. They forced her husband into a room, dragged her out, and put a bullet in her forehead.

Twenty-six dead in 2025 alone. That's two to four a month.

Now imagine you're a farmer in the next sitio. You know these people. You grew up with some of them. And the group that says it's fighting for your liberation is the one pulling the trigger. What do you do?

You do what the people of Toboso did. You start talking to the soldiers.

Not because you trust the government. Not because you've been converted to some ideology. Because the NPA made staying quiet more dangerous than speaking up. When the "revolutionaries" are killing your kagawad and your lola and calling it justice, the calculation changes fast.

That's the accidental soldier. Someone who got pushed into this war by the very people who claimed to be waging it on their behalf.

Kilcullen's whole point is that populations sit between two forces and move toward whichever one scares them less. The NPA forgot that. They thought terror would buy loyalty. Instead it bought them a community-wide intelligence network working for the other side.

Which brings me to Alyssa Alano.

She was a Pol Sci student at UP Diliman. USC councilor. Former LFS chair. She reportedly went to Negros to study the conditions of farming communities. I actually believe she meant well. There's a version of this where she does legitimate research and gives voice to the legitimate grievances of the people against the powers that be.

But that's not what happened. She ended up at the encounter site in Brgy. Salamanca, in the same location as armed NPA fighters and a commander with a ₱1-million bounty. And whatever she thought she was doing there, Kilcullen has a word for it. She got pulled into an armed movement not because she was a terrorist, but because she was caught in the gravitational field of a dying ideology that still knows how to recruit idealistic kids from Manila and send them to the mountains.

She became an accidental guerrilla.

And here's what gets me: the farming communities she went there to understand? They're the ones who called the Army. The people she wanted to help had already made their choice, and it wasn't the NPA. The farmers of Toboso didn't need someone from UP to come explain their problems to them. They knew their problems. Their problem was the NPA killing their neighbors.

The Toboso operation worked because of something no tactical manual can teach you. It worked because an entire community decided, collectively, that they'd had enough. Years of spy-tagging executions, years of watching people they knew get murdered for the crime of existing, and they reached the breaking point. They didn't pick up rifles. They picked up phones. And that was enough.

Kilcullen taught me that bad operations create guerrillas. The NPA taught Negros that bad revolutions create soldiers.

The people made their choice.