Casualties mount across three states in onslaught of shelling, bombing by Myanmar junta

The regime forces’ indiscriminate air and artillery attacks caused injuries, deaths, and damage to civilian targets in three states in the first two weeks of February, according to local rights groups and anti-junta armed groups. Troops in southern Shan State’s Pekhon and Nyaungshwe townships have been shelling the eastern shore of the Moebye Reservoir with heavy artillery since the beginning of the year, local rights advocacy groups said. In Nyaungshwe Township, at least five people including a child were killed and at least a dozen injured as artillery shells hit several villages on the shore. A man in his 40s and a 10-year-old boy died at the scene and three other people sustained injuries when shells landed in Taung Poet Kwe village on Wednesday and Thursday, according to a local rights organisation. Civilian casualties were also reported on February 5 when two locations in Loi Nwet, a village on a peninsula protruding into Moebye Reservoir from its northeastern shore, were struck by the shells. Three men had also been killed and five injured by shells fired from a junta base on the western shore of Moebye Reservoir in Pekhon Township on February 5, local sources said. Houses in Nyaungshwe Township’s Yae Pu and Nyaung Lay Pin villages also sustained damage from the shelling over the following weekend. Fighting initially broke out in Nyaungshwe Township on January 30 when resistance fighters ambushed a column of junta troops and members of the Pa-O National Army, an armed group that fights alongside regime forces. According to the Inle Women Union, part of the Human Rights of Inle Region group, three people had also been killed and at least 14 injured by junta artillery strikes in January. Spokespersons for the Karen National Union (KNU) claimed that two villages in Kyaikhto Township and a village in Bilin Township, Mon State were targeted by military warplanes on Thursday.Giving few details, the representatives of the KNU—which, along with its armed wing the Karen National Liberation Army, is Myanmar’s oldest ethnic political organisation—claimed three people were killed, ten were injured, and a school was damaged in the airstrikes. The KNU includes areas of Bago Region and Tanintharyi Region, as well as Karen and parts of Mon State, in its claimed territory in eastern and southern Myanmar. Aftermath of a junta aerial attack on Daw Yauk Khu village in Karenni State’s Demoso Township, a resistance-held area where bombs damaged a hospital on Thursday (Photo: Supplied) Junta aircraft also bombed western Demoso Township in a resistance-controlled area of Karenni (Kayah) State on Thursday, damaging a hospital in Daw Yauk Khu village. “Bombs landed on a vacant hospital in the centre of the village but luckily, there were no civilian casualties,” a spokesperson for the Karenni Human Rights Group (KnHRG) said. The aerial assault came after Karenni resistance forces captured a junta outpost in the state’s Shadaw Township near the Thailand-Myanmar border. Another nine people were killed and more than two dozen injured by junta airstrikes in southern Sagaing Region on Wednesday, an area where territory is divided between junta and resistance forces and fighting remains intense.

Casualties mount across three states in onslaught of shelling, bombing by Myanmar junta

The junta attacked areas of southern Shan, Mon, and Karenni (Kayah) states with aircraft and heavy artillery, killing at least eight people and injuring dozens as well as damaging a hospital

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