U.S. Helicopters Used to Kill Civilians in Philippines, Locals Say

The Philippines is accused of recklessly using U.S. weapons in operations against its own civilians whose use could trigger legal restrictions on arms transfers.

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U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (L), with Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines General Romeo Brawner Jr., inspect honor guards during his visit at Camp Aguinaldo on March 28, 2025 in Quezon city, Metro Manila, Philippines. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is in the Philippines, focusing on strengthening security cooperation and addressing concerns in the South China Sea. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)

BAGGAO, Philippines—Black Hawk and ATAK helicopters swooped overhead and began firing into the mountains on an early February afternoon. Farmers tilling crops and tending their water buffalo ran for cover, taking shelter as the helicopters strafed the area. In a nearby town square, onlookers recorded with their phones, gasping as explosions ripped across the horizon. A Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter later made rounds in the area, witnesses said, as soldiers sequestered farmers in shelters. They were kept from their farms for weeks as their harvest wilted and died.

It’s a scene that has become a monthly occurrence in the rural Philippines, beginning in early 2023 and continuing today. The military said it was pursuing rebels from the communist New People’s Army (NPA), a designated terrorist group active since 1969, when Jose Maria Sison founded the New People’s Army—a Maoist group waging an armed rebellion primarily based in rural areas. The military and NPA have been in conflict ever since, despite several rounds of failed peace talks, most recently in 2023.

But since 2023, the Philippine military has started using advanced attack helicopters and fighter jets supplied wholly, or in part, by the United States, in a rapid escalation of counterinsurgency operations that have tormented rural communities and led to numerous potential international humanitarian law violations that could trigger policies preventing U.S. military aid, according to dozens of witnesses and experts who spoke to Drop Site News.

Washington says it is arming its ally to defend against Chinese aggression, but the U.S.-manufactured helicopters have so far been used solely on domestic targets.

The NPA’s numbers have dwindled: the military says it has about 1,500 members, although the NPA claims to have far more. The counterinsurgency continues to act as a cover for military and government officials to quash local resistance to infrastructure projects, according to scores of allegations by local and international human rights groups.

Filipino state officials are frequently accused of “red-tagging,” or falsely labeling activists and political opponents as communist rebels. Several “red-tagged” activists have been killed in suspicious circumstances and with no investigations into their deaths, such as Zara Alvarez, a legal worker who was shot dead in a crowded public square in 2020. Others have been kidnapped, such as youth activists Jolina Castro and Jhed Tamano, who disappeared in 2023 before resurfacing and accusing the military of forcing them to falsely surrender as communist rebels.

In March, an FA-50 jet crashed in the country’s southern mountains on an apparent counterinsurgency mission, killing both pilots. Days earlier, Black Hawk helicopters strafed Indigenous communities in the central island of Mindoro, according to the Manila-based human rights group Karapatan.

Karapatan has recorded at least 22 aerial bombings in the rural Philippines since February 2, 2023. That’s when the then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Manila and announced a milestone agreement for U.S. troops to use four additional military bases in the Philippines, strategically facing the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

On the same day, the Philippine military used helicopters purchased in U.S.-sanctioned arms transfers to launch airstrikes against insurgents in remote areas of northern Luzon, adjacent to three of the bases set to be used by the U.S. military, sending farmers in the rural municipality of Baggao fleeing from their fields.

The farmers ran to the town square of Birao, where they sheltered for several days. They were forbidden from accessing their farms for more than one month, causing them to lose an entire harvest. Each family was given about $85 as compensation by the regional social welfare bureau. “It wasn’t enough,” said Rosario Anban, a farmer. “We couldn’t get to our crops because we were scared.”

The military used white phosphorus during its aerial operations in Baggao, according to rights groups, although it was seemingly far from civilian areas. The next month, the military dropped white phosphorus about a football field’s distance away from Gawaan Elementary School, according to multiple Gawaan residents who spoke to Drop Site.

The mostly Indigenous residents of Gawaan, a remote mountain town accessible only by a dirt motorcycle path, were not used to conflict. They rely on farming, loading vegetables onto jeepneys and selling them at market. In recent years, they have protested a planned dam project that would inundate the nearby Saltan River, flooding part of the valley where they live and farm.

Eufemia Bog-as told Drop Site she had just fallen asleep after a village party in the early morning of March 5, 2023 when she heard explosions outside and saw the lights of fighter jets passing over the mountains. “We woke up to the sound of bombs,” she recalled. “They allegedly saw combatants in that area, and they just bombed it.”

Hours later, local farmer Aldrin Aggulin says he was stopped at a checkpoint on his way to check his crops, where soldiers asked him if he was a member of the NPA. After Aggulin said he was a civilian, the military told him to hold a gun. “They said they wanted to take a photo,” he said. He refused, fearing the military wanted to produce a rebel to justify the airstrikes. “They would claim I was a NPA [member] and kill me,” he said.

During the commotion, his uncle, Martin Bulaay Jr., said he arrived at the checkpoint, en route to check on his farm animals. The military held the two, along with another farmer, for seven hours, refusing to give them food and water, they said.

Forced surrenders are commonplace in the region, according to multiple Gawaan residents who spoke with Drop Site. Soldiers can receive large cash payouts for producing a communist rebel, so they often coerce civilians into posing as NPA members or falsify claims of mass surrenders, sometimes to comical effect, with clearly photoshopped imagery.

Gawaan residents said the military had told them to sign affidavits saying they were not rebels. When they refused, the military announced Gawaan was cleared of rebels anyway, enabling the village to receive a payout from the government’s controversial anti-communist task force. The government initiative has become notorious for falsely labeling civilians as communists and other intimidation tactics. A UN rapporteur said last year the task force should be abolished, citing human rights issues associated with “red-tagging.”But this payout never came, the residents said.

“It’s the milking cow of the military,” said Bog-as, who is part of a tribe that opposed the planned dam project. “Those funds supposedly going to [villages] are being pocketed by the higher-ups.”

Days later, the military escalated its operations after it said it had spotted communist rebels once again. According to multiple eyewitnesses, a military helicopter flew about 100 yards from Gawaan Elementary School on March 11, 2023, and allegedly dropped white phosphorus on the hillside. Children screamed and hid under their desks, according to a parent and a teacher who were present at the school and asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation.

White phosphorus is heavily restricted under international humanitarian law and banned from use in populated civilian areas. Its seeming proximity to an elementary school, where a gust of wind could have blown it onto the skin of children and teachers, left Gawaan residents furious and worried that the military was reckless in its apparent pursuit of communist rebels.

“Now, when children hear helicopters, they go and hide,” said Gawaan farmer Cosme Dumag.

A report by the Cordillera Administrative Region office of the Commission on Human Rights, released to Drop Site and other interested parties more than one year after its completion, said it had found no evidence of military misconduct, angering residents of Gawaan.In the report, the military admits to using white phosphorus as a demarcation marker and claims that civilians were not at risk of being harmed. The regional commissioner and report authors initially agreed to interviews with Drop Site, but stopped responding to phone and email correspondence after providing the report.

Interviews with more than three dozen civilians and local government officials show a continuation of this behavior, painting a picture of a military operating with very little accountability or independent oversight.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines and its Northern Luzon Command did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The number of troubling actions taken by the Philippine military—which was largely inoculated from U.S. criticism of drug war killings by the Philippine police—raise new questions about a defense ally generally seen as Washington’s oldest and strongest friend in the region.

Washington’s Weaponry for Marcos Jr.’s War

When Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr. became president of the Philippines in 2022, he quickly began courting U.S. support, and his military announced a shift in focus from domestic counterinsurgency operations to external defense—a response to repeated confrontations with the Chinese Coast Guard in Philippine waters, which have drawn international condemnation.

Washington has remained steadfast in supporting its former colony, providing more than $463 million in security assistance since 2015, along with over $1 billion in active arms sales, and forming close ties with President Marcos. In July, Marcos traveled to Washington and met with Hegseth and President Trump, who announced a trade deal with Manila in a Truth Social post and said the two countries would “work together Militarily (sic).”

In April, the U.S. approved the potential sale of 20 F-16 fighter jets to the Philippines as part of an estimated $5.58 billion deal, one week after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visited the Philippines and vowed to reaffirm the alliance between the two countries. Earlier this year, the U.S. and Philippines concluded their largest ever battle-readiness military exercises that included live-fire drills, fighter jets, and an anti-ship missile system.

The T129 ATAK helicopters, along with other AgustaWestland helicopters in the Philippine arsenal, use U.S. components, and their acquisitions are sanctioned by the War Department. Manila, capital of the Philippines, likewise obtained the S70i Black Hawk and Bell helicopters through U.S arms transfers.

A State Department spokesperson referred Drop Site to a media announcement on U.S. arm sales, which said it would boost the Philippine Air Force’s capabilities in “maritime domain awareness and close air support missions” and also “increase the ability of the Armed Forces of the Philippines to protect vital interests and territory, as well as expand interoperability with the U.S. forces.” They did not specify whether the F-16 jets in the proposed sale would be used by the Philippines in counterinsurgency operations.

The United States presumes to have “a unity of shared political and military interests” with the Philippines, said Nerve Macaspac, an assistant professor of geography at the City University of New York and co-author of a 2020 article on the country’s anticommunist campaign. “But the Philippines also has a set of local interests to eliminate the communist insurgency.” To do this, the military has evaded U.S. scrutiny and turned its newly acquired weapons against its own people, even when civilians and activists wind up in the crosshairs.

“The U.S. is able to somehow distance itself from human rights violations related to the Philippine counterinsurgency,” said Macaspac. “It does not recognize the ways in which the Philippine government and military actually utilize parts of U.S. military funding to carry out these counterinsurgency efforts and, as a consequence, also commit human rights violations.”

These violations could trigger provisions in U.S. law that should block military assistance to individual units of the Philippine military who can be credibly accused of committing gross violations of human rights.

The “Leahy law,” a term for two such provisions that came into focus during Israel’s war in Gaza, ensures that no foreign military unit guilty of human rights violations receives U.S. assistance until it has taken prescribed remediation efforts. Its namesake, former U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, was banned from the Philippines in 2019 after supporting a critic of Duterte.

“A major goal of the Leahy law is accountability,” said John Ramming Chappell, the advocacy and legal advisor at the U.S. program of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is a cornerstone law when it comes to human rights and security assistance in the United States.” Chappell said that, while the white phosphorus incident would not fall under the auspices of the Leahy law, it “raises questions about how security forces in question are identifying civilians and determining civilian status,” a duty of allied militaries under international humanitarian law.

The Leahy law has had little effect in stemming human rights abuses within the Philippine military, despite a history of U.S. government concerns with its behavior. Charles Blaha, who served as director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights from 2016 to 2023, said his department focused on the Philippine police, who killed thousands in Duterte’s deadly drug war, and did not recall the law being applied to military units involved in the counterinsurgency.

The Leahy law blocks foreign units from receiving military assistance for which it does not pay, but it does not address weapons purchased from the U.S. government or defense contractors. Those were covered by a policy known as the Conventional Arms Transfer policy, Blaha said.

The U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer policy was put in place under President Biden and rescinded in March by President Trump. It had set a standard that arms would not be transferred to countries where they would, “more likely than not,” be used to commit atrocities—a higher standard than those set by previous administrations, Blaha said. In practice, however, its application was more subjective than that of Leahy and is frequently influenced by political matters. “Human rights can get outweighed by other factors,” Blaha said.

In 2021, a $2.3 billion security assistance package to the Philippines was quietly paused by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, then chaired by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), a source with knowledge of the situation told Drop Site. This action frustrated Biden administration officials, who saw the Philippines as central to its Pacific Deterrence Initiative, the source said. Former Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) introduced a bill that would make military assistance to the Philippines contingent on its human rights record, citing alleged rights violations by the Philippine military, but this bill never made it out of committee.

In practice, suspending assistance requires cooperation with embassies, which “always want these arms transfers to go forward,” Blaha said.

The State Department announced an initiative in 2023 to track civilian deaths from U.S.-supplied weapons. “As far as I can tell, [it] has not resulted in any action against any country anywhere in the world,” said Blaha, who left the State Department shortly after it took effect. “My impression is it’s a dead letter.”

“Where will we go to seek justice?”

This serves as cold comfort in cases such as the 2024 death of Jose Caramihan, a farmer killed in the tiny village of Pinapugasan on the central island of Negros.

Days before his death, Jose was visited by his daughter, Charlene, a student in the nearby town of Escalante. She was months away from graduation, and Jose could barely hide his pride. Born to poor sugar farmers in Negros, he started working on farms after completing elementary school. After he married, he leased a small plot of land to grow rice and worked to support his eight children. Charlene was going to be the first to graduate from college. “He asked me what I would do in the future,” Charlene said. Three days later, he was gone.

It left Caramihan’s friends and family to piece together what happened on the day he died.

The 79th Infantry Battalion said it encountered three members of the NPA on Feb. 21 2024, near the Caramihan family farm, and shot them dead after exchanging gunfire. That afternoon, two AgustaWestland AW109 helicopters launched airstrikes, allegedly targeting fleeing rebels. The military ordered almost 800 civilians to evacuate their homes and sealed the area.

People did not know why the military was keeping them from their homes, but they noticed the absence of Caramihan, who had been a fixture in their community for decades. Ariel Baloarte, a tricycle driver, said Caramihan was a sponsor of his wedding—a Filipino tradition reserved for godparents or respected community figures. “He wasn’t a rebel,” Baloarte told Drop Site.

Caramihan had eagerly volunteered to join the Special Workers Against Crime, a local group that cooperates with police, said Junathan Pabalate, a local government councilor, who insisted that Caramihan was not a NPA member. On a hot April afternoon, Pabalate retraced what were likely the last steps of Caramihan’s life. He walked to the farmer’s cabin, which lay abandoned in the untended field, covered in bullet holes.

Caramihan had spoken to his daughter the day before, saying that a pair of NPA rebels were camping on his property and that he was afraid to confront them. When the military encountered the rebels the next day, he was outside working on his farm when soldiers began firing at all three, Pabalate said. Given no chance to surrender or explain who he was, Caramihan then began running toward a nearby ditch and across a stream, where he and the two rebels were found dead.

Charlene tried in vain to contact her father. The next day, she asked government officials to look for him. “We asked everyone, the army, the media, if they knew where my father was,” she said. On Saturday, three bodies arrived at a funeral parlor. The military said they belonged to communist combatants. Charlene identified one of them as her father.

“I was shocked that they labeled him as a rebel,” Charlene said. She scowled as she spoke, her fist clenching in anger. “He was good to everyone.”

Lieutenant Colonel Arnel Calaoagan of the 79th Infantry Battalion insisted Caramihan was a communist guerrilla and said there were “factual errors” in reports claiming otherwise. The case also troubled the head of the Negros Island division of the government’s Commission for Human Rights, Vicente Parra, who told Drop Site the military had not responded to his requests for more information about the encounter.

But Caramihan was a farmer with no history of involvement with communist or leftist groups; multiple family members, friends, and neighbors who knew him personally told Drop Site. Instead, he was a community presence who officiated the wedding of a young couple and worked as a wood chopper to earn extra income. “Every wood house [in Pinapugasan] was the work of my father,” Charlene said. Caramihan was even a member of a volunteer anti-crime organization that works with local police, two Pinapugasan government officials said.

The 79th Infantry Battalion has not admitted that Caramihan was a non-combatant. But weeks after the killing, shortly after Charlene had told local media her father was not a rebel, Lt. Col. Calaoagan gave her an envelope containing $260 in cash, she said. Calaoagan also said the local government would pay for the education of Charlene’s two siblings, and the battalion later posted their account of the meeting on its Facebook page.

“What would it mean to accept it?” an exasperated Charlene asked. “Where will we go to seek justice?”

When presented with these claims, a spokesperson for the 79th Infantry Battalion referred to past press releases and Facebook posts in which Calaoagan said Caramihan was a rebel and declined to provide further comment.

Charlene said she was afraid to visit the farm in the months since her father’s death, even after the military began allowing access to the area. She met with Drop Site in a secure location, believing she had been watched by military personnel after not immediately accepting its offer of financial assistance.

After being interviewed, she sent a Facebook message the next day, asking if the crops were still alive.

“I don’t want to harm anyone,” she said. “I just want justice. I just want to know where he was shot. I want to know where he was killed. I want to know what happened to my father.”

This article was produced with the support of a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.