Residents of San Myo in northern Magway Region’s Gangaw Township say they believe their village has been reduced to ashes by junta troops who occupied it earlier this week.
Most of the inhabitants of San Myo, a village of around 200 households located about 70km north of the town of Gangaw, fled ahead of the arrival of regime forces on Monday.
Now in hiding in a forested area some distance away, they say they started coming under artillery fire early the next day, when they also began to see thick columns of smoke rising from the village.
A day later, more smoke could be seen, and by evening there were flames rising high into the sky, said one villager who asked not to be named.
“They started torching houses again at around 2pm. We could still see the flames late at night,” he told Myanmar Now on Wednesday.
“The fire was so big that it could be mistaken for a wildfire,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Gangaw People’s Administration Team, formed by local resistance forces, said the fire could be seen from more than 12km away.
“We could see the flames from here last night. They were higher than a palm tree,” he said from an undisclosed location.
The spokesperson, who goes by the alias of Nway Oo, said that more than 3,000 residents of two other villages east of San Myo have also been forced to flee amid fears of attacks by soldiers in the area.
A total of around 13,000 people have been displaced from dozens of villages in Gangaw Township due to recent junta offensives, he added.
The troops that seized control of San Myo were part of a force that carried out an air raid on the village of Hnan Khar last Friday.
As many as 20 people are believed to have been killed in that attack, although search teams that entered the village after the troops left on Sunday said they found only nine bodies.
Residents of San Myo said that the troops arrived in two columns and arrested eight people as they took control of the village. One person was also killed, they added.
The troops were reportedly accompanied by members of the pro-military Pyu Saw Htee militia.
Gangaw Township is part of northern Magway’s Yaw region, which is at a strategic crossroads between Sagaing Region to the east and Chin State to the west.
Earlier this week, junta forces also set fire to around 100 homes in a village in Sagaing, while there were similar reports coming out of Chin State last week.
In a report released last Tuesday, the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an independent group of former United Nations human rights observers, said that Myanmar’s junta, which seized power in a bloody coup in February, should be a terrorist organization for its use of violence against civilians.
