Hundreds of residents fled a remote Philippine village as the death toll from fighting between Muslim rebels and a local political clan rose to 11, the military said Monday.
About 150 armed clan members and 130 Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) guerrillas remained in the village of Tenok on Monday, a day after the clash, said Colonel Prudencio Asto, a local army spokesman.
Sunday's firefight occurred ahead of peace talks between the government and the MILF later this month, and the army had deployed a force of about 100 soldiers in the area to stop another flare-up, Asto said.
"The commanding officer (of the battalion) was directed to establish a buffer force to prevent escalation of hostilities," he added.
The death toll from the fighting rose to 11 with the recovery of the bodies of two followers of the Mangudadatu clan who had been declared missing after the clash, along with that of a MILF rebel, he said.
The clan's most prominent member is Esmael Mangudadatu, governor of Maguindanao province. The military said he was not at the fight.
"The area of Tenok is now vacated by civilian populace," Asto said. The rural village had about 900 residents.
Asto said "personal grudges" between personalities on both sides were to blame for the fighting, which he said was not linked to the 12,000-member MILF's decades-old armed campaign for an independent Islamic state.
The MILF, which has a ceasefire with Manila, has not publicly commented on the clash. The two sides resumed peace talks last month in Malaysia, with a second round of negotiations set there later this month.
Maguindanao has been riven by Muslim separatist rebellion and warlordism for years, making it one of the poorest and most violent provinces of the Philippines.
The insurgency has left 150,000 people dead according to some estimates.
Mangudadatu's wife and several relatives were among 57 people killed in the country's worst political massacre in November 2009.
Members of a rival Muslim clan are on trial for the murders, along with scores of militia forces armed and trained by the government to fight the MILF.
