hardship and lack of education made it easy to entice them to come down to the City. On 18 August 2015, five Ata Manobos were killed in Sitio Mahayhay, Barangay Mendis, Pangantucan, Bukidnon. The military claimed the killings resulted from an encounter between the 1st Special Forces Battalion of the Philippine Army and the SPP1 Guerilla Front 68 of the NPA. However, during the Public Hearing conducted by the CHR in Davao, witnesses testified that the killings were a rub-out of a Lumad family perceived by the military to be sympathetic to the NPA. Two of the five victims were minors – 13 and 16 years old, and the other was a blind 72-year-old person. Less than a month later, in the first week of September 2015, the nation was shocked by the slaying of an executive director of a privately-operated learning institution accused of teaching insurgent ideology to Lumad children. His throat was slit from ear-to-ear in Bagani fashion. The Bagani, in traditional Manobo culture, are warrior-defenders of their tribe. Immediately following the grisly killing was the execution of two more Lumad, a leader and chairman of an IP group called the Maluhutayong Pakigbisog Alansa sa Sumusunod (Mapasu), and a barangay officer. Residents of Diatagon in Surigao del Sur, Mindanao – including children, women and the elderly – were forced by the perpetrators to gather in the town square to witness the atrocity. The message was not lost on the townspeople. Fearing more violence, some 2,000 residents fled their homes. The governor of Surigao del Sur accused a paramilitary group operating in the towns of Diatagon, Lianga, San Agustin and Marihatag as responsible for the killings. Then, on 19 October 2015, the Mayor of the Municipality of Loreto, Agusan del Sur, and his son were abducted from Barangay Baan Riverside, Butuan City. On 26 October 2015, the CPP-NPA-Southern Mindanao Regional Operations Command claimed full responsibility for the executions, describing it as “revolutionary justice.” The Mayor was a Lumad and former NPA rebel. He later became a staunch critic of the NPA and was instrumental in the surrender of around 150 of his former comrades. A month before his killing, he led the Provincial Tribal Council of Agusan del Sur into signing a manifesto which denounced the abuses of the CPP-NPA-NDF against IPs and declared their ancestral domain to be off-limits to the insurgents. On 3 December 2017, eight Lumad farmers were killed in an encounter with the Army’s 27th and 33rd Infantry Battalions and the Philippine Marines in South Cotabato. According to Datu Jerome Succor Aba, co-chairperson of Sandugo, Lumad farmer families had sought to reclaim 300 hectares of their ancestral land from a mega-corporation which had earlier displaced their families. A day before the encounter, a military official was supposed to have warned the Lumad farmers, especially Datu Victor Danyan, to surrender. Danyan, a Lumad leader who denied being a member of the NPA, was among those killed by the military forces. On 9 February 2018, Dakula Guillermo Tiambong, a Lumad leader of the Mamanwa tribe in Alegria town, Surigao del Norte, was killed by alleged members of the NPA in Davao del Norte. According to the 402nd Infantry Brigade, the vii