Last month, two Americans were killed in a foreign state’s counterterrorism operation. If Lyle Prijoles, 40, and Kai Dana-Rene Sorem, 26, had been part of a group of jihadi terrorists in the Middle East, their deaths would likely have generated national headlines. But they were in the Philippines, fighting for the New People’s Army (NPA), a decades-old Maoist insurgent group that serves as the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
The two appear to have died fighting: many Western reports of the incident explicitly note that Prijoles’s and Sorem’s deaths occurred in a “firefight,” implying an exchange of fire between both sides. Nor were they fighting on the side of good: both the CPP and NPA are designated foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.
