Myanmar’s terror from above

First come the drones to pinpoint targets. Then the regime’s jets and helicopters strike, coming at night or early morning—firing cannons or rockets, or dropping shock wave bombs, unguided missiles, and cluster bombs into unprotected villages and towns. With little more than caves, trenches dug under wooden houses, and prayers to offer the local population some sense of security, the human toll has been devastating. The evidence of the regime’s air war against civilians is damning. Nyan Linn Thit Analytical, an independent research organisation documenting human rights violations in Myanmar, estimates that as of August last year, the military had ordered 902 airstrikes since staging its coup in February 2021, killing 686 civilians and wounding another 458. In the same period, 26 hospitals, 54 schools and 86 religious buildings were destroyed by aerial attacks, according to the group’s findings. The records of the UN refugee agency UNHCR also attest to the impact of this strategy of indiscriminate destruction by the regime. By its estimates, by the end of last year, more than 2.3 million people had been forced from their homes in Myanmar as a result of the post-coup conflict. Aerial assaults—which have intensified in recent months as the military faces an unprecedented wave of defeats on the ground—are an extension of the military’s scorched earth approach to warfare. “In over two and a half years since the coup, at least 86,134 houses and buildings (including religious buildings) have been torched and destroyed, with 64 percent of these happening in 2022 alone,” the Institute for Strategy and Policy—Myanmar, an independent think tank, reported last September. A visit to the many clinics and hospitals treating and caring for the hundreds of severely wounded adds grim detail to the statistics. Survivors of the military regime’s constant aerial onslaught and artillery bombardments, including women, men and children, fill their beds, testifying to the immense harm and loss caused by the junta’s callous disregard for the suffering of ordinary civilians. Children killed by an airstrike on Kanan, a village in Sagaing Region’s Tamu Township, on January 7 (Supplied) The night it rained bombs Naw Paw Say Htoo, 12, is one of those who have survived an airstrike. Ever since the night her home village, Htee Gaw Hta, was bombed three and half months ago, she has made a slow and painful recovery from injuries sustained when a low-flying jet dropped its bombs, killing and wounding fellow villagers and destroying their homes and school. Naw Paw Say Htoo is not a soldier nor can her village be classified as a military target. Yet this grade-five student, who enjoys singing, church choir, playing with friends, and going to school, was a target. Naw Paw Say was badly injured and her cousin and uncle were killed when the jet attacked. Still in recovery at the Border Health and Development Centre on the Thai Burma border, Naw Paw Say Htoo balances the crutches she now needs to move around against a wall, inches her small body into a plastic chair, and describes the night the military regime’s jets were ordered to terrorise her village. “It was around 6pm. I was on my way to church. I had stopped by my uncle’s house when the jet came. When we heard it, we ran towards the bunker under the house. My cousin said he’d first check for snakes. We stopped. The bomb dropped.” The Karen Women’s Organisation reported a large bomb exploded near the village school on September 7, killing a teacher and three students. Another teacher and five students were also wounded in the airstrike, including Naw Paw Say Htoo. “My legs and face were cut and bleeding. It hurt. I was scared. People were running and shouting. I called out for my father. Villagers were running and crying, some stopped and came to help me. I don’t remember much, only the pain.” Naw Paw Say Htoo found out later her uncle and her cousin were dead. “My cousin was the same age as me. We went to school together,” she said. The aftermath of a junta drone strike that killed at least 29 internally displaced persons, including 11 children, in the village of Munglai Hkyet in Kachin State on October 9, 2023 (Supplied) Naw Paw Say Htoo’s father did what he could to help his daughter withstand the pain before taking her bloodied and broken body to the nearest clinic—an arduous three-hour trip by foot and car. The monsoon rains made parts of the road impossible for even four-wheel-drive vehicles to use. Staff of the Border Health and Development Centre took her to a small hospital in Thailand, and from there she was transferred to the larger, better-resourced Mae Hong Son Hospital, on the Thai-Myanmar border. Naw Paw Say Htoo’s right leg was shattered, requiring extensive surgery and pins to help mend her broken bones. Above her left knee, a fist-sized slab of flesh and muscle was sliced off by shrapnel. Her face was also scarred by bomb fragments.She said she is thankful for the care and treatment she has received from local Thai hospitals and the Border Health and Development Centre, but misses her friends or having people closer to her own age to talk to. “The other patients and nurses here are nice, but they’re much older than me. I miss my friends. I want to see them. I want to go back to my village, and school—I miss it. The hospital in Saung Hpway, in Shan State’s Pekhon Township, a day after it was hit by airstrikes on April 25 last year (Myanmar Now) The army medic defending her people Less than two months after the coup, the military regime gave insight into the ruthless force it was prepared to use against those who opposed its rule. The junta ordered its drones, jets, and helicopters to bomb Day Bu Noh, a village located in Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) Brigade 5 territory, where hundreds of regime opponents, including Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) protesters, journalists, students, and workers, had been given sanctuary. The junta was also angered by the fact that KNLA forces had taken control of a number of important Myanmar army camps strategically based along the Salween River. The airstrikes would last three days, destroying homes, schools, and part of the hospital, and displacing thousands of villagers. Naw Hser Nay, 23, a trainee medic at the time, witnessed close up the chaos and terror, as jets fired indiscriminately into her village. “I was training at the hospital when the airstrike happened. It was the worst time—the hospital was already busy with patients.” Naw Hser Nay described how the planes made repeated forays, flying low over the village. “Houses were burnt to the ground, and people in shelters were in shock, crying from fear. We could clearly see the planes as they flew low overhead. People were scared … didn’t know if they would survive. It was chaos. We had to evacuate the hospital. Parents were looking for their children and children were searching for their parents.” It would be days before she could return to the hospital, as jets continued their deadly flights over the area, terrifying children and adults alike. Schools, homes, and other buildings were destroyed by missiles or fire and bomb craters the size of a building dotted the landscape. The Karen Human Rights Group reported the initial attack on Day Bu Noh village resulted in three deaths and 11 injured. The group had photographic evidence of the attacks on Day Bu Noh and surrounding villages in Brigade 5’s Mutraw District that showed the human cost, devastation and destruction caused by the military’s aerial bombardments. The walls of buildings were broken and tattooed by cannon fire, schools were missing their roofs, and homes were wrecked and reduced to ash. A villager shows a bomb shelter used by residents of the village of Kone Tar in northern Shan State’s Namhsan Township to protect themselves from junta airstrikes (AFP) The dead lay covered by Karen sarongs; the injured, bloodied and broken, waited in pain—testimony to the terror waged by the military’s jets. By the end of March, after three days of airstrikes in Mutraw and Kler Lwee Htoo districts, at least 16 villagers were dead, while many more were injured and at least 15,000 were forced to take shelter in jungle hideouts. The bombing of Day Bu Noh was not the first time Naw Hser Nay, as a trainee medic, had witnessed the result of armed conflict. As a KNLA medic, she did her practical training at the frontline. “As student medics, we had to help look after the wounded. I was only a student… I was impressed by how senior medics responded [to casualties]. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to learn more. I wanted that knowledge,” she said. “When someone is badly injured, it is up to us medics to do the best we can. When they stay alive and recover, I’m happy. When I meet my patients outside and I see how our treatment has worked in their recovery, I know we’ve done our best. It’s good to be able to help—it’s a good feeling.” Naw Hser Nay is also proud of being an active KNLA soldier. “As a soldier, I can fight or defend my people. I can assemble or disassemble my gun. The knowledge of defence is important for us to learn—with it we can defend ourselves and our people.” Her senior colleague, Hser Eh Htoo, has been a medic for five years, working in the KNLA’s Medical Emergency Centre on the Myanmar side of the Salween River. “Most of the cases we see are war wounded—from landmines, gunshot, shrapnel, mortar, and now from airstrikes. We also treat malaria, respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, pneumonia, and dengue fever in the wet season,” he said. A shifting frontline means that patients at the Medical Emergency Centre often need to travel a great distance to receive care. Recent intense fighting in Demoso, Karenni State’s second-largest town, has seen the wounded make the long trek for medical aid. “They travel by car to the Salween and then it’s four to five hours by boat to our clinic—a long way if you’re bleeding and in need of emergency health care.” “There’s no X-ray here, so all we can do is stop the bleeding and help with the trauma.” Despite the constant exposure to emergency cases, Hser Eh Moo is motivated by his work and explains where he finds his meaning. “Despite seeing a lot of trauma and young soldiers and villagers with life-changing injuries—amputated legs or arms, or loss of eyesight, hearing or mobility, is common—I’m satisfied with my work. I’m helping my Karen people, and all people—all ethnicities, and the young Burmese People’s Defence Force soldiers fighting for freedom from military rule. This is why I will continue to do this work.” Villagers flee junta airstrikes in Sagaing Region’s Depayin Township in July 2022 (Supplied) A failure to act The people of Myanmar are mystified by the failure of international governments to do anything about the regime’s carnage, despite the vast amounts of credible documentation attesting to its war crimes. Last year, a report by the OHCHR, the UN’s human rights agency, laid out in horrific, graphic detail the slaughter delivered to civilian areas by the regime’s jets and helicopters. The 14-page report describes how on the morning of April 11, 2023, the villagers of Pa Zi Gyi in Sagaing Region’s Kanbalu Township were hit by one of the junta’s 902 documented attacks on civilian targets. Eyewitnesses quoted in the report said the aerial assault started at around 7:30am, as refreshments were being handed out to a large crowd that included many children and elderly men and women gathered for the opening of a community centre on the edges of the village. The UN report described the end consequences of the airstrike on the village: “150 civilian deaths, including 19 women, 21 girls, and 14 boys.” These figures do not include many still missing; unconfirmed estimates claim the death toll could have been more than 200. Survivor statements included in the report added grim detail to the horror that villagers and first responders faced in the aftermath of the attack: “A Yak-130 military combat aircraft bombed the site with a reported fuel air explosive bomb, immediately killing most of the victims. From the village, people rushed to the scene to assist those injured. An interviewee described ‘People lying on the road, with body parts spread everywhere.’ ‘Some people had no head, no arm, no leg,’ and, ‘you couldn’t put your feet down without stepping on bodies or blood,’ said another witness.” But the junta’s killing was not yet done in Pa Zi Gyi. The helicopters and jets returned throughout the day, dropping bombs and shooting at rescuers. “An Mi-35 military helicopter arrived and opened fire on those on the ground. Rescuers ran for cover while carrying the injured… Survivors recounted that many people died because of the shooting from the helicopter while looking for missing family members. One said, ‘I couldn’t hear any more sound from the survivors shouting for help—they had all died.’” The OHCHR report confirmed “the likely use of a thermobaric or fuel explosive weapon in the attack” on Pa Zi Gyi. Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, an expert at the Forum on the Arms Trade, explained how thermobaric explosives work. “They’re weapons that use blast power to destroy. They come in all sizes. Those dropped from aircraft are much larger and do a massive amount of damage. The way these weapons work is that inside they have a type of liquid, more flammable than either petrol or gasoline. This sprays out into the air, a small explosion detonates it, creating a very large fireball and a blast wave. The blast wave is followed by a wave of intense heat that incinerates. The air-dropped [thermobaric bombs] are devastating and their destructive manner has been compared to a low-yield nuclear weapon,” he said. Moser-Puangsuwan warned that, because of the explosive power of these weapons and their indiscriminate effect, they should not be “used in populated areas. To do so is inexcusable, they should never be used in civilian areas.” Despite its relentless aerial and on-the-ground artillery bombardment of civilian targets, including villages, hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, and temples, the junta has failed to frighten its opponents into submission. If anything, it has increased their determination to rid the country of its control. A common and constant mantra heard when conducting interviews, whether with CDM protesters, healthcare workers, students, ethnic soldiers, defectors, workers, or People’s Defence Force members, is: “We have to remove the military regime from our country… this time we have to win.” But even as human rights organisations condemn his regime’s use of airstrikes on ordinary villagers, junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing remains indifferent to the human cost of these attacks. In a speech delivered last month to mark the 76th anniversary of the founding of Myanmar’s air force, he praised his jet and helicopter pilots for their effectiveness and efficiency in attacking forces opposed to his coup—conveniently ignoring the fact that many well-documented reports estimate that as many as 80% of these aerial assaults targeted civilian populations. The Karen National Union's spokesperson, Padoh Saw Taw Nee, said the callous targeting of civilians had succeeded only in reinforcing hostility to the regime. “There is no denying, it is terrifying for civilians. The only protection they have is the small bunkers they’ve built. If villagers can find a cave, they’re lucky. And it’s not only the airstrikes. They [the regime] are also using heavy artillery—80mm to 120 mm shells,” he said. “The regime is trying to create fear among the people to try to split them from the democratic opposition, but it’s not working—it’s had the opposite effect.” Phil Thornton is a journalist and senior adviser to the International Federation of Journalists in South East Asia

Myanmar’s terror from above

The Myanmar military’s aerial assaults on civilian targets has killed hundreds and severely wounded many more, but have yet to break popular support for the resistance

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