Three Indonesian soldiers were killed in a gunbattle with Papuan independence fighters, the military said Thursday, adding to more than two dozen deaths in the conflict since November.
The military spokesman for Indonesia’s easternmost Papua region, Muhammad Aidi, said gunfire broke out midday near Yigi village in Nduga district.
The district was the location of a December attack by Papuan fighters on workers at a construction site for the trans Papua highway that killed 19. Large numbers of people have been displaced by military and police security operations since the Dec. 2 attack.
The bodies of the three soldiers killed Thursday were flown to a hospital in the mining town of Timika.
At least 31 people have died since early November in an apparent escalation of attacks by the West Papua National Liberation Army. The figure doesn’t include unconfirmed civilian deaths that Papuan activists say resulted from security operations following the Dec. 2 attack.
An insurgency has simmered in Papua, which makes up the western half of the island of New Guinea, since the early 1960s when Indonesia annexed the Dutch-controlled territory.
Discrimination against indigenous Papuans and abuses by Indonesian police and military have drawn renewed attention globally as Indonesia campaigns for membership in the U.N.’s human rights watchdog.
The exiled leader of the Papuan independence movement, Benny Wenda, in January presented a 1.8 million-signature petition calling for self-determination to the U.N. human rights chief in Geneva.
