Without warning or apparent provocation, a junta air attack on a village in Saw Township, Magway Region, left four local residents dead and five injured on Monday afternoon, according to the local people’s administration team.
The unannounced assault on Nyaung Kan village, north of Saw and a few miles from the Chin State border, started around 2pm.
“At least three houses were destroyed. Three people from one family and one from another household were killed. Some were seriously injured after getting hit by shrapnel. Five in total were injured,” an officer of the people’s administration team for the township said.
All casualties of the attack were civilians, according to sources within Battalion 2 of the Saw People’s Defence Force (PDF) resistance group, under the command of the Yaw Regional PDF’s Alliance (YRPA). The names of the deceased were Saw Waing, 65, Zaw Min, 46, Zaw Htay, 48, and Kyaw Htay Lin, 35.
Local defence teams helping with rescue operations and medical care also claimed one of the injured was in critical condition.
The military has increasingly relied on aerial assaults throughout Myanmar since early 2022, but the military council has not released a statement regarding the reported attack on Nyaung Kan.
The tactical rationale for the junta air force’s assault remains unclear.
“They arrived unannounced, started dropping bombs on civilians’ houses, then proceeded to fire automatic machine guns indiscriminately,” said Thone Nya (also called Zero), an officer of Battalion 2 of the Saw PDF.
The attack was not in response to previous fighting or the presence of anti-junta fighters in Nyaung Kan, according to Thone Nya.
“The village doesn’t even have a people’s defence team of its own, nor was it politically active,” he said.
Previous assaults by military forces in Saw Township have typically been ground operations. The suddenness of an aerial assault caused panic among local residents, according to an officer of the Saw Township People’s Defence Team (PDT).
“There was no column of junta forces on the ground, so the locals hadn’t needed to flee. But now they are all extremely scared of junta aircraft returning. As the attack came from the air, civilians don’t even know where to run,” the PDT officer said.
