Myanmar junta bombs, sends reinforcements to northern Shan State’s Nawnghkio Township as battles rage

Clashes continued this week in southern Nawnghkio Township, northern Shan State as the ethnic armed group holding the township’s urban centre fought regime forces for full territorial control, according to local sources and anti-junta fighters. After a skirmish broke out on Tuesday morning between the military and members of the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) in the village of Yae Win, regime forces began firing on the area using heavy artillery, sources said. “The battle near Yae Win Village yesterday lasted around an hour and a half,” a TNLA-connected source said on Wednesday. Yae Win is located some 14 miles southwest of Nawnghkio, a town on the Mandalay-Muse road used by freight truckers carrying goods to the China-Myanmar border for trade. The Ta’ang ethnic armed group has held the town since capturing it on July 10 of this year. Local sources also told Myanmar Now on Wednesday that a Myanmar army convoy with around 70 reinforcement troops had arrived in the village of Bant Bway around two miles south of Yae Win. Members of the Mandalay Region People’s Defence Forces (MDY-PDF) confirmed that clashes are still ongoing a few miles to the west in the village of Gant Gaw, Nawnghkio Township. Junta forces around Gant Gaw have been fighting to maintain a defensive buffer preventing anti-regime fighters from advancing towards the strategically and symbolically important garrison town of Pyin Oo Lwin in neighbouring Mandalay Region. The military has been carrying out indiscriminate airstrikes continuously in Nawnghkio Township, hitting both civilian targets and anti-regime forces’ positions in what may be preparation for a counteroffensive to retake northern Shan State from the TNLA and its allies. On Monday, a junta warplane bombed a sugarcane mill near Hsam Ma Hse village, less than four miles northwest of Yae Win and three miles northeast of Gant Gaw, according to TNLA spokespersons. The bombing killed one man and damaged buildings on the mill’s compound, the group said. Another junta airstrike last Saturday killed a 12-year-old and injured three other civilians in Long San, a village nine miles northeast of Yae Win. Four people were also injured in Nawnghkio when a junta warplane bombed the town’s residential wards three days earlier. Three people were killed and six injured by airstrikes in the first week of November, followed the next week by an airstrike on a teashop in Nawnghkio’s centre that killed 11 people and injured another 11. People living in Nawnghkio said that most residents who have not abandoned the town altogether tend to leave their homes at night, seeking shelter from the junta airstrikes in safer areas. “No one dares to sleep inside the town at night. We go to nearby villages and monasteries for safety and return to our homes in the early morning,” a resident said earlier this month. Thousands of civilians have been displaced from northern Shan State since fighting resumed there in late June. The resumption of clashes was due to the breakdown of a ceasefire brokered by Chinese authorities between the military and locally active ethnic armed groups. At least three people were killed and 14 were injured when the junta air force struck Mongngawt and Kutkai—two other northern Shan State towns under TNLA control—on November 17.

Myanmar junta bombs, sends reinforcements to northern Shan State’s Nawnghkio Township as battles rage

In addition to ground skirmishes and shelling, the military has been carrying out continuous, indiscriminate airstrikes in Nawnghkio Township in apparent preparation for a counteroffensive to recapture territory from ethnic armed groups

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