At 3:58 a.m. on Sunday, April 19, troops from the Philippine Army’s 79th Infantry Battalion engaged suspected members of the New People’s Army in Sitio Sinugmawan, Barangay Salamanca, in the municipality of Toboso, northern Negros Occidental. The operation was triggered after a local resident alerted the military to the presence of armed rebels sheltering in a temporary encampment.

What followed was not a single exchange of fire, but a sustained running engagement. After the initial clash, pursuit operations by the 79th Infantry Battalion led to seven consecutive firefights in a secondary area called Sitio Plariding. Each engagement lasted between 10 and 35 minutes. The fighting did not conclude until nearly 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, making it a 12-hour combat event by any practical measure.

At the conclusion of operations, 19 individuals were dead. One soldier sustained gunshot wounds to both arms during the engagements and was treated at a hospital in Bacolod City. Troops recovered assorted firearms including assault rifles, rifle grenades, a hand grenade, and survival supplies from the scene.

Among those killed was Roger Fabillar, also known as “Kumander Arnel Tapang” and “Ka Jhong,” a long-hunted rebel leader who carried a bounty of P1 to P2 million and was linked by authorities to a series of killings of alleged civilian informants in Toboso, Calatrava, and Escalante City since 2024. His killing was confirmed by Brigadier General Ted Dumosmog, commander of the 303rd Infantry Brigade. The 79th Infantry Battalion operates under that brigade, which in turn falls under the 3rd Infantry Division based in the Visayas.

Seven days after the encounter, on April 26, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict confirmed that two of the 19 dead were American nationals. The task force identified them as Lyle Prijoles and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem. Both individuals had reportedly arrived in the Philippines separately in late March 2026 before traveling to Negros Occidental, where the encounter occurred.

The NTF-ELCAC stated that publicly available records showed Prijoles had been affiliated with Anakbayan-USA since 2012, an organisation the task force described as linked to the broader communist movement. NTF-ELCAC Executive Director Undersecretary Ernesto Torres Jr. said the deaths revealed what he called a “disturbing convergence” of foreign nationals in active combat environments.

The US-based advocacy group BAYAN-USA issued its own statement describing Lyle Prijoles as a 40-year-old Filipino-American human rights advocate from California. The group said Prijoles, a graduate of Journalism and Asian-American Studies, had been in Negros to live alongside farming communities and document their experiences with poverty and land tenure disputes. BAYAN-USA described his death as an “unjust murder” and stated he was not a combatant.

GMA News noted it was unable to independently verify the NTF-ELCAC’s claims about the identities and affiliations of those killed. The Philippine National Police’s Scene of the Crime Operatives retrieved the remains for identification on April 20, the day following the encounter.

The Philippine Army maintained from the outset that all 19 killed were armed members of the Northern Negros Front, the local NPA unit, which it described as dismantled as a result of the operation. Army spokesperson Colonel Louie Dema-ala pointed to the recovery of 24 firearms as evidence of the armed nature of the encounter, and challenged critics online with a pointed question: if those present were mere researchers and journalists, why were they firing back at troops?

The NPA’s Apolinario Gatmaitan Command told a different story. The group’s Negros Island Regional Operational Command acknowledged that a small armed squad led by Roger Fabillar was present at the site, but insisted the vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians. A spokesperson named those they said were among the dead: farmer Roel Sabillo, community journalist and youth leader RJ Ledesma, University of the Philippines student leader Alyssa Alano, peasant organizer Maureen Keil Santuyo, and cultural worker Errol Wendel.

Human rights group Karapatan went further, accusing the Armed Forces of the Philippines of committing “war crimes” in Negros Occidental. Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay stated that whether those killed were combatants or civilians, the sheer scale of the casualties raised serious questions about how the operation was conducted. The Commission on Human Rights was called upon by multiple parties to investigate, a call that AFP Chief General Romeo Brawner Jr. said the military welcomed.

The NTF-ELCAC framed the deaths within a broader narrative it has long advanced: that communist fronts in the Philippines engage in what it calls “terror-grooming,” a systematic process of recruiting and radicalising youth and diaspora Filipinos overseas. Torres argued that the incident in Toboso was a product of this process, drawing in individuals from abroad into the direct line of fire of a 57-year-old insurgency. [NTF-ELCAC characterisation; disputed by BAYAN-USA and advocacy groups]

The New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines, has been waging an insurgency against the Philippine state since 1969. At its peak in the 1980s, the movement claimed tens of thousands of active guerrillas. Decades of military pressure, internal splits, and government integration programmes have significantly reduced its strength, though the AFP acknowledges it continues to operate across multiple regions, with Negros Island historically among its more active zones.

The NTF-ELCAC, established in 2018, coordinates a whole-of-government approach to ending the conflict, combining military operations with development programmes and localized integration efforts. The NPA has consistently accused it of using the counterinsurgency apparatus to target legitimate activists, journalists, and community organisers through a process critics call “red-tagging,” the labelling of individuals as communist sympathisers or rebels to discredit or endanger them.

The security situation in Negros has remained tense in recent years. The NTF-ELCAC stated that since 2025, at least 45 civilians have allegedly been killed by the NPA after being labeled informants or traitors, at a rate of three to four deaths per month. The Army cited this pattern as justification for the intensified operations that led to the Toboso encounter. Mayor Richard Jaojoco of Toboso said the clash displaced around 168 families, more than 600 people, from Barangays Salamanca and San Jose.