The West Papua National Liberation Army has resisted counterinsurgency in the Star Mountains for decades. Kristo Langker spoke with guerilla leader Lamek Taplo a week before he was killed.
Kristo Langker || KIWIROK, West Papua—On September 25, 2025, Lamek Taplo, the guerilla leader of a wing of the West Papua National Liberation Army (Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat, or TPNPB), left the jungle with his command to launch a series of raids on Indonesian military posts. Indonesia had established three new military posts in the Star Mountains region in the past year, according to NGO Human Rights Monitor, with sources on the ground telling Drop Site News that nearby civilian houses and facilities—including a church, schools, and a health clinic—had been forcibly occupied in support of the military build-up.
Despite being severely outgunned, the command shot five Indonesian soldiers, killing one, while suffering no casualties themselves, according to Taplo and other members of his group. The raids continued for three more days. The command shot the fuselage of a helicopter and burned five buildings that Taplo’s group claimed were occupied by Indonesian security forces.
Taplo was killed less than three weeks later by an apparent drone strike. During an October 13 interview a week before his death, Taplo, a former teacher himself, told Drop Site why TPNPB targeted a school: “It’s because they (Indonesian military) used it as their base. There’s no teacher—only Indonesians. I know, because I was the teacher there, too… Indonesia sent “teachers.” However, they’re actually military intelligence.”
Indonesia has laid claim to the western half of New Guinea since the 1960s with the backing of the U.S. For the past year, the Indonesian military has ramped up its indiscriminate attacks on subsistence farming villages, especially those that deny Indonesian rule.
The military presence has been growing exponentially after the October 2024 inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto, who is implicated in historic massacres in Papua from his time as commander of Indonesia’s special forces—called Komando Pasukan Khusus or “Kopassus.” According to witnesses interviewed in Kiwirok and its surrounding hamlets, and documented in videos, there are now snipers stationed along walking tracks, and civilians have been shot and killed attempting to retrieve their pigs.
Indonesia immediately retaliated against TPNPB’s September attacks by sending two consumer-grade DJI Mavic drones, rigged with servo motors, to drop Pindad-manufactured hand grenades. One drone targeted a hut that Taplo claimed did not house TPNPB but belonged to civilians. No one was killed as the grenade bounced off the sheet metal roof and exploded a few meters away. The other drone flew over a group of TPNPBraising the Morning Star flag of West Papua but was taken down by the guerrillas before a grenade could be dropped.
Holding the downed drone and grenade, Taplo likened the ordeal to Moses parting the Red Sea for the escaping Israelites: “It’s like Firaun and Moses… It was a miracle.” Then joking, “The bomb (grenade) was caught since it’s like the cucumber we eat.”
Over the next few weeks, a series of heavier aerial bombardments followed. Videos taken by Taplo show two Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft darting through the air, followed by the thunderous sound of ordnance hitting the mountains.
Despite the fact that thousands of West Papuans have been killed in bombings like these since the 1970s, Taplo’s videos are the first to ever capture an aerial bombardment from the ground in West Papua, owing to the extreme isolation of the interior. In fact, many highland West Papuans’ first contact with the outside world was with Indonesian military campaigns.
Ostensibly a counter-insurgency operation against a guerrilla independence movement, these bombings are primarily hitting civilians—tribal communities of subsistence farmers. The few fighters Indonesia is targeting are poorly armed—lacking bullets, let alone bombs—and live on ancestral land with their families. The most ubiquitous weapon among these groups remains the bow and arrow.
Taplo told Drop Site the bombings began on Monday, October 6. “Firstly they (Indonesia) did an unorganized attack: they dropped the bomb randomly… they just dropped it everywhere. You can see where the smoke was coming from. Even though it was an Indonesian military house, they just dropped it on there anyway. That was the first one; then they came back. The first place bombed after was a civilian house; the second was our base.
“I live with the people, because there’s no military to protect my people”
West Papua was a Dutch colony until 1962, when Indonesia, after a bitter dispute with the Netherlands, secured Washington’s backing to take over the territory.
Just three years after Washington tipped the scales in favor of Indonesia in their dispute with the Netherlands, the nationalist Indonesian President Sukarno was ousted in a U.S.-backed military coup in 1965. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists (or suspected leftists) were killed in just a few months by the new regime led by General Suharto.
Indonesia’s acquisition of West Papua is often treated as an event peripheral to this coup, yet both events held a symbiotic relationship that would become the impetus for many of the mass killings perpetrated by Indonesia in West Papua.
Forbes Wilson, the former vice president of U.S. mining giant Freeport, visited Indonesia in June 1966, and in his book, “The Conquest of Copper Mountain,” he boasts that he and several other Freeport executives were among the first foreigners to visit Indonesia after the events of 1965.
Wilson was there to negotiate with the new business friendly Suharto regime, particularly regarding the terms of Freeport’s Ertsberg mine, which was set to be located under Puncak Jaya—the tallest mountain in Oceania.
This mine eventually became the world’s largest gold and copper mine and Indonesia’s largest single taxpayer. The mine’s existence was one of the primary reasons Indonesia gained international backing to launch a vicious frontier war against the native and then-largely uncontacted Papuan highlanders.
The “war” continues to this day, though it is largely unlike other modern conflicts. Instead, the concerted Indonesian attacks are most comparable to the U.S. and Australian frontier wars. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest and most well-armed militaries, is steadily wiping out some of the world’s last pre-industrial indigenous cultures and people.
West Papuans fought back, forming the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM) and its various splinter armed wings, whose most prominent one is the TPNPB. Due to the impenetrable terrain of the mountain highlands, the Indonesian military has difficulty fighting the TPNPB on the ground, often instead resorting to indiscriminate aerial bombardments. The TPNPB’s fight is as much about West Papuan independence as it is an effort by localized tribal communities and landowners using whatever means to prevent Indonesian massacres and land theft.
“No army has ever come to protect the people. I live with the people, because there’s no military to protect my people. From 2021 until this year 2025, I have not left my land; I have not left the land of my birth,” Taplo said in a video sent just before his death.
In October 2021, the Indonesian military launched one of these bombing campaigns in the remote Kiwirok district and its surrounding hamlets in the Star Mountains—deep in the heart of the island of New Guinea.
Because of this isolation, very little information about these bombings trickled out of the mountains—save for a few images of unexploded mortars and burning huts. Only a handful journalists, including the author of this article, have been able to visit the area, and it took years and multiple visits to the Star Mountains for the full scale of the 2021 attacks to be reported.
It was eventually revealed that the Indonesian assaults included the use of most likely Airbus helicopters that shoot FZ-68 2.75-inch rockets, designed by French multinational defense contractor Thales, and reinforced by Blowfish A3 drones manufactured by the Chinese company Ziyan. These drones boast an artificial intelligence driven swarm function by which they litter villagers’ subsistence farms and huts with mortars improvised with proximity fuzes manufactured by the Serbian company Krušik.
A largely remote, open-source investigation by German NGO, Human Rights Monitor, revealed that hundreds of huts and buildings were destroyed in this attack. Over 2,000 villagers were displaced, and they still hide in makeshift jungle camps. “The systematic nature of these attacks prompts questions of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute,” the report noted. Additionally, witnesses interviewed by this author gave the names of hundreds who died of starvation and illness after the bombings.
With little food, shelter, weapons, or even internet to connect them to the outside world, many of the thousands of Ngalum-Kupel people displaced since 2021 are displaced again—likely to die without anyone knowing—mirroring countless Indonesian campaigns to depopulate the mountains to make way for resource projects.
The impact of the latest wave of attacks in October 2025 is likely to be felt for years, as the bombs destroyed food gardens and shelters and displaced people who were already living in nothing more than crowded tarpaulins held up by branches, while having already been forced to hide in the jungle after the 2021 bombings. “It is the same situation with Palestine and Israel: people are now living without their home,” said Taplo.
“Indonesia dropped the bomb on the place I lived in”
On October 6, 2025, Indonesia retaliated further, deploying two aircraft that aviation sources confirmed to be Brazilian-made Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprops. These planes were filmed bombing and strafing the mountains. Drop Site confirmed that some of the shrapnel collected after these attacks is from Thales’s FZ 2.75-inch rockets—the same rockets used in the 2021 attacks.
In January this year, Thales’s Belgium- and state-owned defense company, Indonesian Aerospace, put out a press release titled: “Indonesian Aerospace and Thales Belgium Reactivate Rocket Production Partnership,” which boasted the integration of Thales designed FZ 2.75-inch rockets with the Embraer Supertucano aircraft.
Though these were not the only ordnance deployed, some of the impact zones measured over 20 meters, and the shrapnel found in these craters was far heavier and larger than that from the Thales rockets. “It’s no joke. It was long and big. It could destroy a village…” said Taplo before picking up a piece of shrapnel around 20 centimeters long. “This is five kilograms,” he said, weighing the remnants.
A former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site that the large size of the shrapnel and nature of the scarring and cratering indicate that the bomb was not a modern style munition. It was most likely an MK-81 RI Live, a variant of the 110 kilogram MK-81 developed and manufactured by Indonesian state-owned defense contractor Pindad. “This weapon system is unguided, and given the steep terrain, it is unlikely that a dive attack could easily be utilized, providing the enhanced risk of collateral damage or indiscriminate targeting given the weapons envelope,” the specialist said. Pindad did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.
Photos from a February Pindad press release about the development of the MK-81 RI Live show these bombs loaded on an Indonesian Embraer Supertucano.
A week later, Indonesia hit again. At around 3 a.m., on October 12, a reconnaissance aircraft flew over the camp where Taplo’s command and their families were sleeping, waking them just in time to evacuate before another round of bombs were dropped—again, most likely the MK-81 RI Live.
Taplo captured the bomb’s strike and aftermath on video. Clearly shaken, he makes an appeal for help, saying “UN peacekeeping forces quickly come to Kiwirok to give us freedom, because our life is traumatic… Even the kids are traumatised; they live in the forest, and seek help from their parents, ‘Dad help me. Indonesia dropped the bomb on the place I lived in.’”
On the morning of October 19, a drone dropped a bomb on a hut near where Taplo was staying. Initially, the bomb didn’t detonate, leaving enough time for civilians to evacuate the area. After the evacuation, Taplo and three men returned to remove the ordnance, which then detonated and instantly killed Lamek Taplo and three others: Nalson Uopmabin, age 17; Benim Kalakmabin, age 20; and Ike Taplo, age 22.
Speaking to Drop Site just hours after Taplo was killed, eyewitnesses say the drone was larger than the DJI Mavics deployed earlier and were similar in size to the Ziyan drones from 2021. Photos taken of the remnants of the bomb show the tail of what was most likely an 81 millimeter Mortar. “The presence of drones—similar to that of DJI quadcopters and [with] improvised fins for aerial guidance—have been employed [just as] ISIS utilised those weapons systems in Syria,” the former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site.
On October 26, civilians in Kiwirok sent an appeal to the government of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island nations. So far, there has been no response, despite these bombings occurring on Papua New Guinea’s border. The last communication Drop Site received from Kiwirok indicated that the bombings were continuing and the mountains still swarmed with drones—limiting any chance of escape.
Pictures posted on social media in November by members of Indonesian security forces, those stationed in Kiwirok, give some insight into the level of zeal with which Indonesia is fighting this campaign. An Indonesian soldier can be seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull wearing night vision goggles, a gun, and a lightning bolt forming a cross behind it. The caption reads “Black Zone Kiwirok.”
Another photo shows soldiers sitting in front of a banner which reads “Kompi Tempur Rajawali 431 Pemburu”—a reference to the elite “Eagle Hunter” units set up in the mid 1990s by then-General Prabowo Subianto to hunt down Falantil guerillas in Timor Leste. As there has been no record of these units being deployed in Papua—nor of an “Eagle Hunter” unit made up of soldiers from the 431st Infantry Battalion—it is unclear whether these banners are just Suharto-era nationalism on display, or if they signify that these units have been revived.
On his final phone call with the outside world, just before the signal cut out, Taplo vowed to continue the TPNPB’s fight: “We will fight for hundreds of days… We will fight… This war is by God. We have asked for power; we have prayed for nature’s power. This is our culture.”
This dispatch from Kristo Langker is from the mountains of West Papua, a part of the world we don’t typically cover, and it’s different in another way, too: we usually report on, and from, parts of the world where the U.S. war machine operates. In this story, the weaponry in question is made by a multinational French weapons manufacturer and Chinese manufacturer, but you’ll see the structure is the same: the Indonesian government using drones and helicopters to terrorize and displace the people of West Papua, while the historical reason imperial interests loom over the region stems from a U.S. mining project in the 1960s. The videos in this story are well worth watching: exclusive interviews with the guerilla group fighting off the drones and airplanes with bows and arrows.
If you missed it, yesterday we published a report from José Luis Granados Ceja on U.S. President Donald Trump’s intervention in Honduras’s election when he backed Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party. You can follow Drop Site’s social media feed for more dispatches on the outcome of that election which concludes this evening.
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