Myanmar junta using paramotors to bomb villages in Mandalay, Sagaing regions

Myanmar’s military has increasingly deploying slow-moving, motorised gliders to attack villages from the air in central Myanmar since last month, according to local and resistance sources. The first accounts of a military bombing raid using paramotors—parachute-like gliders propelled by small engines—in addition to planes or helicopters emerged from Za Yat Gyi village in Mandalay Region’s Taungtha Township on December 25, 2024. Reports soon followed of similar attacks in Ngazun Township, Mandalay Region, and on the other side of the Ayeyarwady River in Sagaing Township in the region of the same name, resulting in civilian casualties. The military used three paramotors in an aerial attack on Ngazun Township's Tha Kyin village that killed five people including children on December 31, according to some local resistance fighters. After the first paramotor attack on Za Yat Gyi village, Taungtha Township, there were reportedly more paramotor attacks in a forested area east of the village on January 3, and in the village of Shwe Si Gyi on January 5, according to a local man who spoke with Myanmar Now. “There have been three paramotor attacks altogether,” he said, referring to the attacks that had occurred in Taungtha. “I think the military council wants to instill fear in the public and stop support for the revolution. The paramotors are launched from Shante Air Base in Meiktila. Since they happened in the early morning, we couldn't get photo evidence. They fly without lights,” he added. In the pre-dawn attack on Shwe Si Gyi on January 5, which involved three paramotors, a man named Myint Than, 58, was killed and a 12-year-old child was injured, according to the local man. The attack also killed two cows and destroyed a house and animal feed storage shed, he said. The three paramotors took off from Shante Air Base in Meiktila, Mandalay Region before the attack, flying at low altitude before reaching Taungtha Township. They reached their maximum altitudes before dropping the bombs, he added. A scene in Shwe Si Gyi Village in Taungtha Township after a bombing raid that included the use of paramotors (Photo - Natogyi Journal) While paramotors compare unfavorably with planes or helicopters in their slow flight speeds and incapability of flying at high altitudes or carrying heavy bombs, their strength lies in the resistance forces’ lack of training and equipment needed to shoot them down. “Under present circumstances, since this is the early stage of the junta using them, resistance forces are still learning about them. I think we’ll reach a point where we can shoot them down in future,” a Taungtha local said. As the regime continues to lose territorial control and rely on air power to maintain its strategic advantage, it appears to be supplement its use of fighter planes paramotors in what may be a bid to confound the resistance forces or conserve jet fuel, according to Wan Moe, an officer of People’s Defense Force (PDF) Battalion 3 based in Myingyan District. operated under the command of the publicly-mandated National Unity Government (NUG). “They're not easy to shoot from the ground,” he said, referring to the paramotors. “When it came on January 5, it was at around 5am. We could hear the sound but couldn't see anything above us. The sound was quite loud since it's a motorised vehicle.” "Civilians need to be careful and build bomb shelters. That's all they can do,” he continued. “The military council is apparently not only using airplanes anymore. They use planes, like jet fighters, in battles. But with these things, they randomly bomb places they suspect of harbouring resistance fighters, dropping the bombs by hand.” Deadly attacks in Sagaing Township In Myin Se Village, Sagaing Township, aerial attacks conducted with both paramotors and planes killed three local residents and injured seven. Locals said that at around 10pm, the military deployed a combination of paramotors, support aircraft, and fighter jets in multiple rounds of bombing targeting the village, which is on the north bank of the Ayeyarwady River. The attack killed two men and one woman as well as some livestock, as well as destroying around 20 houses and a monastery. A house damaged by aerial attacks in Myin Se village, Sagaing Township (Photo - Supplied) Myin Se is one of around a dozen villages on the north bank of the Ayeyarwady River in Sagaing Township where junta forces conduct military operations—including ground manoeuvres, airstrikes, and artillery strikes—from their base in Ngazun on the south bank. In one of these villages, Tar Taing, junta troops committed a massacre in March 2023, killing 16 local people including a resistance leader whose body they left dismembered. In 2023, 15 resistance fighters and three civilians were killed in a pre-dawn raid by junta troops on Kin Taw village, a stronghold of the Ngazun Township People’s Defense Force (PDF) near Myin Se. While resistance forces were active in this territory in the past, the recent paramotor attack was wholly unprovoked as there are no resistance groups presently operating in the area, according to one local resident. "There are no revolutionary forces living in Myin Se,” the local man said. “In the past, some Mandalay Region forces took shelter in the Myin Se village tract. But because the army and militias from Ngazun Town knew this, they would conduct airstrikes and shell with 60mm rounds all the time. So there are no forces left there anymore.” Hemmed in by junta base camps on three sides and by the river on the remaining side, Myin Se and neighbouring villages are especially vulnerable to attacks by the military and junta-trained militias. "Within Sagaing Township, this area has seen the highest casualty rates among civilians and resistance fighters,” the local man said. “It's the first to come face to face with any military column that may come.” Myin Se was also the target of an airstrike on November 24, 2024, which damaged a school and some houses. The increasingly beleaguered Myanmar military has lost control of two Regional Military Command (RMC) headquarters since the middle of last year: the Northeastern RMC in Lashio, northern Shan State and the Western RMC in Ann, Rakhine State. Its response to these continuing losses has been to escalate indiscriminate aerial attacks, targeting armed anti-junta groups while also terrorising and demoralising civilian communities across the country. The supplemental use of paramotors, as well as planes and gunships, is one of the few recent innovations in the junta’s methods of conducting these attacks, which have occurred in areas held by resistance forces or adjacent to resistance-held territories across the country for years.

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