Civilian deaths mount in Tanintharyi Region amid clashes between junta, Karen forces

19 civilians have been killed since mid-July in Myanmar’s southernmost region, where junta forces have reportedly locals point-blank and deployed indiscriminate air and drone strikes amid escalating clashes with anti-junta fighters, locals said. Residents of Tanintharyi Region’s Palaw Township told Myanmar Now on Friday that two bodies had been found in the town of Pala, where anti-junta forces have been carrying out assaults on a junta police station for nearly a week. “Resistance fighters discovered the bodies of two men shot dead by junta troops this morning,” said a source close to the resistance forces in Palaw Township. Around half the population of Pala had already been displaced from their homes by previous clashes in the area, with around 1,500 people remaining in the western part of the town, which is under resistance control. The ongoing fighting prompted road closures in Pala, which is some eight miles south of Palaw, the township’s junta-controlled administrative seat. A junta drone strike on Monday also killed five men and four women, most of whom were travellers from other parts of Myanmar who had been stranded in Za Yat Seik village around three miles southeast of Pala. A man had also been killed in a separate drone strike on the village shortly before this incident. Civilians’ bodies found following the junta drone strike on Za Yat Seik village in Tanintharyi Region’s Palaw Township (Photo: Supplied) “Nine of the 10 people killed in the attack were travellers from elsewhere,” said a man who helped to bury the bodies. “They were in three vehicles and were stranded on the way.” “They were sheltering in a house in Za Yat Seik, waiting for the road to reopen,” he added. Locals said the drones had been sent from a junta hilltop outpost near Saw Taw Yar village around two miles to the northeast. “By the time we arrived, only bodies remained at the scene,” an eyewitness said. “While we were looking, more bombs struck some nearby houses, so we had to leave and could only return the next morning to bury the bodies.” The travellers had been forced to pause their trip the previous day near Pala on Route 8—a high-traffic highway connecting Tanintharyi Region with Bago Region—as battles broke out nearby between the military and anti-junta forces in the area. Locals said that an alliance of anti-junta fighters led by the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)—the armed wing of Myanmar’s oldest ethnic national organisation, the Karen National Union (KNU)—engaged in fierce clashes with the military in that area, prompting authorities to close the road. Za Yat Seik village, the target of the junta’s drone attacks, is less than a mile northeast of Ta Po, a village held by resistance fighters blocking the military regime’s attempts to send reinforcements to Pala. On July 19, a 13-year-old boy was killed in Baing Pyin village on Pala’s southeastern edge when a junta bomb hit a small grocery shop in the area. Four people also sustained injuries in the attack. Sources said a man from Kyauk Kan Hpe village, about three miles southeast of Pala, was also killed by junta shelling on July 25. Five more civilians including two monks were also killed in separate junta bombings in Palaw Township, according to a local human rights monitoring group, which did not provide further details about the incidents. There are three junta infantry battalion bases and an artillery battalion base in Palaw Township, which lies within territory claimed by Brigade 4 of the KNU/KNLA. The area is also home to Battalion 1 of the Myeik District People’s Defence Forces and Battalion 7 of the Karen National Defence Organisation, another, slightly older armed wing of the KNU.

Civilian deaths mount in Tanintharyi Region amid clashes between junta, Karen forces

In addition to a drone strike that killed 10 people in a Palaw Township village, locals have been shot, shelled, and bombed by junta troops around the town of Palaw

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