Junta soldiers, militia members kill 10 civilian men in Gangaw Township raids

Content warning: This article contains a graphic photo of victims of military violence which may be disturbing for some readers. Troops from a unit of 200 Myanmar army soldiers and members of the military-backed Pyu Saw Htee militia killed 10 civilians as they advanced through Gangaw Township in Magway Region on Wednesday, locals said. The troops had left the village of Myauk Khin Yan in the early morning and divided into three columns, raiding the communities of Thintaw and Shwebo to the south, where they attacked and killed residents—men, who ranged in age from their 20s to their 50s. In Thintaw village, the victims were identified as Bo Than and Pyu Tha, both 56; Htay Aung, 52; Tint Lwin, 36; Maung Naing and Maung Pu, both 33; and Kyaw Moe Lwin, 26. The bodies of the seven men from Thintaw were found by resistance forces on Wednesday night, piled on the side of the road between their village and Shwebo. “When we found them, the bodies were tied with ropes, and their hands were tied, too,” an officer from the Gangaw Township People’s Defence Team (PDT) said. “They had been shot in the head. Some of them had been shot all over their bodies. They were massacred.” Myo Thant, 37, and Toe Lwin, 25, were both killed in Shwebo, along with Zaw Lin Aung, 37, who had fled his home in the nearby village of Kantoe and was killed when junta forces fired on the area. All three died of gunshot wounds to the head. The Gangaw PDT declared that none of the men had belonged to the armed resistance movement. “They were genuine civilians who were trapped in the villages,” the officer said. The bodies of seven villagers in Thintaw, Gangaw Township, who were killed and abandoned by a joint force of junta troops and Pyu Saw Htee militiamen on February 14 (Gangaw PDT) Junta forces also reportedly detained some 13 children, elderly persons, and women during the attack on Thintaw, and their whereabouts were not known at the time of reporting. While the raiding column returned to Myauk Khin Yan after attacking Shwebo, locals said they did not know if they had taken the hostages with them. An officer from the Chinland Defence Force chapter of Kalay, Kabaw and Gangaw said that their group and an ally, the All Burma Students Democratic Front, attacked the soldiers stationed in Myauk Khin Yan at around 8am on Wednesday and were forced to retreat when they ran out of ammunition. The junta has not issued any statement on the killing of civilians in Gangaw, but pro-military channels on the social media platform Telegram reported that there had been a battle near the village of Shwebo and that seven members of the People’s Defence Force (PDF) were killed, and handmade guns and ammunition seized. However, resistance forces said that they were not harmed during the recent clash. It is not known whether the “seven PDF fighters” mentioned by the junta propaganda channels was a reference to the seven Thintaw villagers found dead and tied up on the roadside. The junta’s hold on Myauk Khin Yan Myauk Khin Yan, where the junta soldiers came from and returned to, was recently exposed as the site of a gruesome killing: two 20-year-old resistance fighters in the local Yaw Defence Force were tortured and burned alive in the village in November. The troops and militia members responsible filmed their murder, and the footage was shared online earlier this month. The 1,000-household Myauk Khin Yan is located on the road connecting Gangaw with the town of Kalay in Sagaing Region; Pyu Saw Htee and soldiers used to regularly raid and set fire to villages along this route, leading to fierce clashes with local resistance groups. When anti-junta forces made territorial gains in the area in late 2022, the troops in Myauk Khin Yan stopped these attacks, fortifying themselves in the village, which was transformed by the military soon after the February 2021 coup into a Pyu Saw Htee stronghold, surrounded by trenches and security guard posts. However, after reportedly being airlifted new weapons and ammunition earlier this month, they began operating outside of their Myauk Khin Yan base again, assaulting local villages. In this week’s raid, the junta forces torched more than 20 homes in Thintaw and six houses in Shwebo, seizing rice, cooking oil, and loading their cars with other food items that they looted. Two-thirds of Thintaw’s 220 houses were burnt down in early 2022, as were 30 houses in Shwebo. According to data published last July by the publicly mandated National Unity Government’s Ministry of Human Rights, there have been 144 mass killings of at least five people in Myanmar since the coup, causing 1,595 civilian deaths. Ninety of these events were perpetrated in central Myanmar’s Sagaing Region, and 15 in neighbouring Magway, where Gangaw is located.

Junta soldiers, militia members kill 10 civilian men in Gangaw Township raids

The raiding troops came from the military-backed Pyu Saw Htee stronghold of Myauk Khin Yan, the village where two resistance fighters were recently filmed being burned alive

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