Colombia: Pre-dawn attack on FARC camp kills 35 rebels

The Colombian military has bombed a guerilla camp in central Meta province killing 35 rebels tied to the left-wing FARC group.

According to Associated Press, the bombing happened just before dawn and five insurgents, including three women were captured by commandos afterwards.

They also seized weapons and computers at the camp, which was located at the camp in Vista Hermosa.

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CNN quotes the President Juan Manuel Santos as saying that the offensive continued into Monday:  "The Armed Forces are continuing their offensive, and they are not going to stop. They are going to continue. They are going to persevere."

The overnight attack is the second major blow to Colombia's main guerilla group in less than a week, Reuters points out.  It says that an attack last Wednesday killed 33 rebels who were resting in the northern plains region of Arauca.

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"The operations form part of a new military strategy to fight the Marxist guerrillas by destroying their key armed and financial units, marking a shift from the previous focus of tracking down and killing their leaders," the news agency explains.

FARC is Latin America's longest-running rebel group, but its fighting force has dropped by almost a half to about 8,000 in the past decade, Al-Jazeera says, and many of the group's leaders and founding members are dead.

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