Myanmar junta airstrike targets resistance graduation ceremony in Magway Region

There were no reported casualties on Wednesday morning after a Myanmar air force jet conducted an attack targeting resistance forces in Mindon Township, Magway Region during a graduation ceremony for enlistees. According to Ba Hein, the commander of the Mindon People’s Defence Organisation (PDO), a junta fighter jet flew into the area around 9:30am. The plane then conducted a ten-minute bombing raid over and around the football pitch where the PDO had finished the ceremony less than an hour earlier. The resistance group knew that the military had received a tip about the ceremony, Ba Hein said, and averted tragedy by starting earlier than originally planned as a precaution. “The news about the training graduation had been circulating since it started. That was why we went through the ceremony quickly and very early in the morning to avoid coming under attack. The ceremony started at 7am and finished at 9am, and the aircraft only arrived after it was over," he said. He added that there had also been no injuries from the airstrike among local civilians, but that many of them had been frightened and fled into the nearby woods and hills. “Their aim was to intimidate the people in this area,” Ba Hein said, referring to the military. “We think they were trying to oppress the locals using fear, making a show of force because of the ceremony.” Mindon Township, located on the eastern edge of the Rakhine Yoma—a range of low hills—shares borders with Rakhine State’s Ann and Taungup (Toungup) townships to the west, and with Magway Region’s Thayet and Minhla townships to the east and north, respectively. Although the junta conducted ground operations late last year and in February of this year near where the ceremony took place—the villages in the piedmont of the Rakhine Yoma—they are now only conducting operations along the Pathein-Monywa road section near Mindon Township’s urban centre. According to sources in Mindon Township-based resistance groups, the junta troops have apparently launched these operations from their checkpoint at the road’s 5-mile marker because their priority is to safeguard their control of the road. Troops based in Thayet and Minhla have also been carrying out ground offensives in the area, they said. Thayet and Minhla townships are the sites of factories operated by the junta-controlled Myanmar Directorate of Defense Industries (DI), which produce munitions such as mortar shells, long-range vehicle-mounted rockets, and bombs. The primary duty of many junta troops stationed in Thayet and Minhla is to guard the DI munitions factories. “Mindon, which is in the foothills of the Yoma, is an important site strategically if we want to cut off the routes used by the DI. If we can get a foothold here, we can cut off the military’s supplies,” Ba Hein said.

Myanmar junta airstrike targets resistance graduation ceremony in Magway Region

Anti-junta forces based in the foothills of the Rakhine Yoma in Magway Region are hoping to cut off the supply routes of the regime-controlled Myanmar Directorate of Defence Industries, which manufactures munitions for the military in nearby townships

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