Following attacks by anti-regime fighters, some 70 junta troops and police retreated from a police station in Magway Region’s Gangaw Township on Saturday, according to resistance sources.
Since the 2021 coup, the military has substantially increased the number of personnel manning the police station, located in the village of Taung Khin Yan some 40 miles north of Gangaw on the Kale-Gangaw road.
According to Pyae Phyo Kyaw, a spokesperson for the resistance group All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), the available intelligence suggests the personnel from the station are moving towards the military’s regional operations command headquarters in Kale, Sagaing Region, following their retreat.
“I heard that they have gone from Myauk Khin Yan to Han Thar Wa Di, a military-controlled village with a police station,” Pyae Phyo Kyaw said, referring to villages on the Kale-Gangaw road north of Taung Khin Yan.
“It looks as if they will retreat all the way to the Da Ka Sa in Kale,” he added, referring to the regional operations command headquarters by its Burmese abbreviation.
Resistance forces initiated assaults on the Taung Khin Yan police station on November 1. Two days later, the resistance successfully captured another police station in the village of Min Ywar some seven miles south of Gangaw, killing six junta soldiers and taking 11 prisoners as well as seizing weapons and ammunition.
Following the raid on the Min Ywar police station, the military reportedly sent reinforcements from Myauk Khin Yan to Taung Khin Yan, forcing the resistance fighters that had besieged the Taung Khin Yan police station to pull back.
From their new position, the resistance forces continued attacking the station using improvised weapons and drones, but were unable to see the junta personnel manning the station, Pyae Phyo Kyaw said. They only realised that the soldiers and police had left the station when they stopped returning fire.
“The junta troops from whom we pulled back were positioned at one point on the Myintha Creek, and there was another positioned at another point on the bank. Because they retreated along the bank, they were under cover of darkness and hidden from our sight as they withdrew,” said Pyae Phyo Kyaw.
The resistance forces torched the police station to prevent the military from retaking it, and defused or removed the explosives that the military had set in the surrounding area.
“They placed mines in places you wouldn’t expect so we had to go around with little knives in order to disarm them. We didn’t have any other equipment or machinery to use. They mainly placed explosives on the banks and in ditches where people are likely to step,” Pyae Phyo Kyaw said.
The ABSDF emerged as an armed group during the military crackdown on the 1988 pro-democracy protests in Myanmar. Although it is a signatory to the National Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) of 2015 between the military and various armed organisations, the ABSDF has fought against the military in collaboration with other anti-junta armed groups since the 2021 coup.
A year after the coup, junta soldiers stationed in Taung Khin Yan began to extort money from travellers and carry out arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings, local residents said.
The military’s violence and intimidation has forced almost the entire population of Taung Khin Yan, a village of around 1,000 households, into hiding.
“We have told people they still shouldn’t go into Taung Khin Yan,” said Nyaung Yan, a member of the village’s people’s administration team.
“We’re concerned that they’ll be hit by the heavy artillery in the Pyu Saw Htee village less than eight miles away,” he added, referring to the junta-trained militias that control some villages in the area.
After resistance groups burned down the police stations in Min Ywar and Taung Khin Yan in the first week of November, junta reinforcements were reportedly sent to police stations in the nearby villages of Han Tha Wa Di and Kan on the Kale-Gangaw road.
Armed resistance groups based in central Myanmar have been attacking junta outposts in Sagaing and Magway regions since the beginning of Operation 1027, an offensive launched in late October by the tripartite Brotherhood Alliance in northern Shan State.
The defence ministry of the publicly mandated, anti-junta National Unity Government announced that resistance forces had succeeded in capturing at least eight military bases in Sagaing and Magway regions on Friday.
