Airstrikes carried out by Myanmar’s military killed at least 13 civilians, including four monks, and injured more than a dozen others across northern and western parts of the country over the weekend, according to local sources.
The attacks, which coincided with the start of the annual Thingyan holidays, targeted at least five monasteries in Sagaing Region and other locations in Mandalay Region and Chin and Rakhine states.
The most recent strikes were reported in Sagaing’s Kani Township, where two monks and a 19-year-old woman were killed Monday morning during the bombing of villages along the Chindwin River, including Tha Min Chan, Mu Htaw, and Su Lay Kone, sources said.
“It’s like World War Two, with bombs being dropped from all types of aircraft. It’s only because we have strong bomb shelters that we are able to survive,” said a local man.
Residents who spoke to Myanmar Now said that the regime deployed jet fighters, Mi-35 combat helicopters, paramotors, drones, and Y-12 aircraft to launch the attacks on civilian targets.
The sources added that there were no clashes near the villages that were hit on Monday.
On Sunday, local resistance forces reported an attack in Mandalay Region’s Thabeikkyin Township, where a man and a woman died after two military jets dropped bombs on the village of Chaung Gyi at around 10 pm.
Eight others were injured in the attack, which also destroyed 14 houses in the village located roughly 66 miles north of Mandalay.
Farther north, airstrikes were also reported on Sunday in Sagaing’s Wuntho, Indaw, and Kawlin townships, including one on a monastery in the village of Gyoe Taung Ywar in Wuntho and another on a monastery in Pein Hne Kone, a village in Indaw.
Another airstrike on Nyaung Kone, a village on the Shwebo-Myitkyina highway in Kawlin Township, left at least two people injured, sources there reported.
Three people also sustained injuries during an airstrike on the town of Kyauktaw in Rakhine State on Sunday, and in neighbouring Chin State, a church was damaged in the town of Mindat, four days after six people, including two children, were killed in the township by an aerial assault on the village of Hpwi on April 9.
On Saturday, an airstrike on a monastic school in Kya Khat, a village about nine miles south of the town of Depayin in Sagaing, killed at least five people, including three novice monks, and injured nine others, sources said.
“The bomb landed directly on the monastery. One of the victims’ bodies was torn apart. We could only retrieve flesh and body parts,” said a man who visited the monastery in the aftermath of the attack.
The victims were identified as an elderly man, three teenaged novice monks, and a ninth-grade student from the monastic school in Kya Khat, which was considered a safe haven for war-displaced people living in the area.
Sources said at least 50 people from Depayin had been sheltering at the monastery since last year, when resistance forces launched an offensive to capture the town.
The number of fatalities from the attack is expected to rise, as several of the injured were said to be in critical condition.
Another airstrike on Saturday also killed one woman and injured four others in Sagaing’s Taze Township, after junta warplanes dropped four bombs on a monastery and surrounding houses in Ywar Ma, a village, around eight miles southwest of the junta-controlled town of Taze.
“The first bomb damaged a pagoda. The second bomb destroyed a two-storey monastery building. The third bomb killed a woman when it struck her house,” a spokesperson for a local resistance group told Myanmar Now.
There were also reports of airstrikes in Sagaing’s Mingin Township on Saturday, resulting in the deaths of two women during an attack on the village of Zin Ka Le, according to local sources.
