Local anti-junta resistance forces say they have strengthened their control over Myaung Township in Sagaing Region, carrying out security checks at entrances to the area and seizing boats and vehicles believed to belong to the coup regime.
Fighters from the Civilian Defence and Security Organization of Myaung (CDSOM) are checking vehicles as they come and go at five main points on the township’s outskirts, and are also checking boats that pass the area along the Chindwin river, an officer from the group said.
“The reason we have security checkpoints is for scouting purposes. It’s more about scouting than about control,” he told Myanmar Now. “That way we can gather intel on what times they enter which areas and what they can do and what they are doing. We are finally able to carry out such actions efficiently.”
On December 3 the CDSOM seized two boats passing along the Chindwin river, an oil vessel and a cargo ship, after those on board were unable to demonstrate that the vessels did not belong to the junta, the officer said.
“We told them to confirm that the ships were not affiliated with the junta and nobody managed to do so,” he said. The group will take “serious action” against anyone who refuses to submit to security checks, he added.
The CDSOM officer declined to give further details about the checks, but as junta forces are still active in the area, its fighters are not operating on the roads in plain sight.
Myaung is home to about 100,000 people, and sits in a strategically important pocket of flat land at the confluence of Ayeyarwady river and the Chindwin river.
In September the junta sent reinforcements to occupy a police station in the Myaung village of Kyauk Yit after it was attacked by resistance fighters. Soldiers then burned down the village and shot at anyone who tried to put out the fires, residents said at the time.
More soldiers arrived from Monywa over the weekend and set up camp at the Myaung township police station, an officer from a local resistance force who did not want to be identified told Myanmar Now.
He added that, contrary to what some people had been saying on Facebook, it was not true that resistance forces had gained full control over Myaung.
There were however fewer junta forces in the area because of increasingly effective attacks by various guerrilla groups, he said.
“We only managed to increase the damage from our attacks using explosives,” said. “Our recent intel suggests that the military council has been sending reinforcements to the region.”
The CDSOM officer said that every administrator from Myaung’s four urban wards and 48 village tracts had resigned from their posts, crippling the junta’s governance mechanisms in the township.
“Their governance mechanisms have stopped operating but they still have departmental staff members on their side,” he said. “Therefore, we still do not have complete control over everything.”
A junta spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
Resistance forces stopped a civilian vehicle heading towards the Kyauk Yit village police station from the Myaung township police station on December 1 and confiscated six boxes full of police items including watches, certificates, and photos, the CDSOM said.
The CDSOM is one of several armed groups fighting the junta in Myaung. The others include the Myaung Special People’s Defence Force, the Myaung Women Warriors, the Burmese Guerilla Force and the Hna Lone Hla Lu Mite Gyi Myar Group.
The groups form part of an alliance of over 60 resistance forces in central Myanmar.
Thousands of locals have fled their homes in Sagaing Region amid attacks by junta soldiers as part of Operation Anawrahta, a major campaign aimed at crushing the armed resistance in Chin State and Sagaing and Magway regions.
