The West Papua National Liberation Army has resisted counterinsurgency in the Star Mountains for decades. Drop Site spoke with guerilla leader Lamek Taplo a week before he was killed.

Kristo Langker
Nov 30, 2025

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.