The costly resistance operation that saved hundreds of civilian hostages

For the civilians living in the Yae Twin Kone village tract in eastern Bago Region’s Nyaunglebin Township, there was no warning of the living hell about to befall them. Arriving suddenly in the predawn hours of March 5 and taking over the village, junta troops would kill several civilians and hold hundreds hostage over the next few days, prompting a daring, resistance-led rescue operation in which 11 anti-junta fighters lost their lives. March 4, the day before this dire crisis, was peaceful and routine for the residents of Yae Twin Kone, Kyaung Kone, Kha Yu Kone, and Wet Che villages, all located in the Yae Twin Kone village tract some three miles east of the small, junta-controlled town of Pein Za Loke and a mile west of the Sittaung River. PDF fighters in the National Unity Government’s Southern Military Region 2 Operation Area (Photo: Bago Region Military Command – NUG) As they would on any other Wednesday, by around 6am swarms of motorbikes and lumbering tractors loaded with sacks of beans made their way from the jetties on the riverbank to the town market. Resistance forces manned sentry stations looking out on the new Yangon-Mandalay highway. As the same tractors and motorbikes moved back towards the river under the blazing sun that afternoon, the drivers took little notice of the sounds of artillery or bombs in the distance or the drones occasionally whizzing overhead. Shops selling tea, fried rice, and salads stayed open as usual. Phone connections were poor, with signals dropping often. Conventional internet was also cut off, with the resistance forces relying on Starlink, but there were no Starlink cafes or other means for civilians to access reliable internet service. Two Myanmar Now reporters passed through and visited a tea shop in the Yae Twin Kone village tract that day. Following their schedule, they had moved on to another part of Bago Region by the time the tragedy occurred. Army descends on Yae Twin Kone The soldiers who arrived in the village tract at 5am the next day, March 5, were disguised as resistance fighters. Members of the anti-junta forces later told Myanmar Now that they had forced their way into the villages by holding residents at gunpoint. Numbering around 30, the group took several villagers captive, planning to use them as guides and human shields as they moved through the resistance-held area, freely passing by the resistance forces’ checkpoints and sentry stations on the roads. According to a source connected to the Bago Region Military Command of the People’s Defence Forces, the soldiers first arrived and took hostages in the village of Kyaung Kone. Map showing the junta army troops’ advance towards Yae Twin Kone village tract Armed resistance fighters—mostly members of the People’s Defence Forces (PDF) under the command of the publicly mandated National Unity Government (NUG)—were active in the area. Having heard that soldiers had taken over the villages and were holding civilians hostage, the resistance fighters surrounded Kyaung Kone village. However, they were caught off guard by the mass hostage-taking, a new tactic in the area, and were uncertain how to proceed. At the same time, some 300 reinforcement troops arrayed in two columns began advancing towards the PDF outposts in Yae Twin Kone from Pein Za Loke, according to resistance sources. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, the resistance fighters withdrew, allowing the army troops to take control of most of the village tract and occupy the four villages of Yae Twin Kone, Kyaung Kone, Kha Yu Kone, and Wet Che. The soldiers began detaining scores of civilians who had been trapped in the village tract, unable to flee before the fighting broke out. Speaking at a press conference ten days after the incident, the NUG’s Bago Region Military Command spokesperson Saw Do Shin said the military had deployed troops into the area to capture it as part of a broader effort to expand their territorial control after holding closely controlled elections in January. “Military Commission troops have been moving to expand territory since the sham election,” Saw Do Shin said. “They are using all sorts of methods. In this case, they didn't just take civilians hostage; they were unhesitant to sacrifice people.” The tactic of using captive civilians as human shields to bypass checkpoints, observed often in other parts of Myanmar since the coup, was virtually unprecedented in Bago Region. Killings begin According to the NUG Bago Region Military Command’s estimate, the junta troops occupying the Yae Twin Kone village tract ultimately took more than 300 local civilians captive. The exact number of captured civilians is unconfirmed. There is a discrepancy between the totals reported by the Bago Region Military Command and the Karen National Union (KNU), which estimated a minimum of 160. Up to thirty of the hostages died while in the junta troops’ hands. Both the KNU and Bago Region Military Command reported 25 civilians killed in an airstrike on a monastery in Kyaung Kone. However, the KNU said five were shot dead by junta troops and the Bago Region Military Command counted three. In a statement to the media in mid-March, the Bago Region Military Command also reported 10 civilians missing. The greatest number of captive villagers died on the afternoon of March 5 in the Kyaung Kone airstrike, which hit the village monastery where locals were sheltering after leaving their homes elsewhere in the village tract, according to sources on the ground. “The captured villagers were told to go to the Kyaung Kone monastery, and then planes came and bombed it,” one source said. A resistance fighter from the Bago District 3702 Battalion, who later participated in the hostage rescue, confirmed the account of mass casualties from the airstrike. He also said he heard from rescued civilians about soldiers shooting captives at close range. “They didn’t shoot everyone one by one, but they shot those they suspected,” he said. The soldiers forced the men among the captive civilians to lie face down in the sun and denied them water or food, taunting them by asking “Where will you run?”, according to a member of the Spring Warriors column resistance force, citing first-hand accounts from freed hostages. Victims of the March 5 airstrike on the Kyaung Kone village monastery (Photo: NUG Ministry of Human Rights) Drone footage released later by the Bago Region Military Command shows civilians digging graves under a red-blossomed cotton tree, with several bodies lying by the side of a dirt road nearby. At the NUG’s mid-March press conference, a local farmer recounted the horrors he lived through that day. Soldiers detained him and four other villagers carrying goods to the market. They stopped him on his motorbike, tied his hands behind his back, and forced him and his companions to lie face down on the ground for several hours, he said. “The five of us were lying with our hands tied behind our backs. We pleaded with them to release us, saying we were losing feeling in our arms and that we needed to use the latrine. Some of them told us to just go in our longyis,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Don't move, and if you raise your head or speak, we’ll shoot.’ So we didn't dare keep speaking,” the farmer said. “Later, around 10:30am, a soldier came and untied the ropes.” After being untied, the farmer still did not want to risk getting up, and stayed lying face-down the whole day. When they finally gave him permission to leave at around 5pm, he went to look for his family. “When I went to the monastery, I found my wife and the people around her already dead. My 13-year-old son was missing,” he recalled. “I was like a madman. I was weak after lying face down all day and getting nothing but water, but I searched the whole village. I couldn’t find him. I heard the soldiers saying on their radios that they had shot a child.” He finally found his son's body with two gunshot wounds to the knee and two in the back. “My heart was broken. I already knew my wife was gone. But shooting this child... The pain was unbearable,” he said. “My child was not a PDF fighter. He was not an informant. Now, I have had to bury them both myself.” Still at the mercy of the soldiers occupying the village, the farmer said he was only able to go free after the PDF came to rescue the hostages that night. Nighttime rescue Upon hearing about the mass detainment and violence against civilians, resistance fighters were spurred by their anger to carry out a rescue operation as soon as they could, a representative of the Spring Warriors battalion told Myanmar Now. “There was a feeling of self-reproach, with many comrades asking why we were so useless,” he recalled. “Some of them were so bent on rushing in the same night that it was hard to hold them back. We told them our commanders were making plans and that going in blind would only cause more casualties. We had to keep that situation under control.” The Bago Region Military Command’s tactical units and Brigade 3 of the Karen National Liberation Army—the armed wing of the KNU—hastened to agree on a joint plan for the operation. They ultimately deployed forces—which included six PDF battalions, two KNLA battalions, and specialised commando and drone units—from six starting locations in the village tract. “We had some mishaps because of deficiencies in our equipment,” the Spring Warriors spokesperson said, without going into specifics. “But we tried our best and made it work.” The rescues took place on the nights of March 7 and 8. Working in the dark was the greatest challenge in the operation, according to participants, but it was important for the sake of the civilians’ safety. “We had to take care that our own bullets wouldn’t hit civilians,” an operations officer said. “We had to scout the enemy positions meticulously beforehand.” Footage released later by participating resistance battalions shows what appear to be PDF members using lights mounted on their rifles to aim and fire in the dark. The resistance members had to brave artillery fire, rifle fire, and drone strikes to get to the civilians and guide them to safety one by one, according to a member of Bago District Battalion 3702. “When we advanced, they fled from the stations they had taken,” he said of the junta troops. “They retreated to a rear line and fought defensively from there. That was when we directed the hostages to get out. Although we knew there was a threat of airstrikes, we managed to rescue about 150 to 160 people in one night.” A mother and child injured during the March 5 airstrike on the Kyaung Kone monastery (Photo: NUG Ministry of Human Rights) Resistance fighters came under close-range fire during the operation and suffered significant casualties, according to Saw Do Shin, who confirmed that the rescue necessitated leading civilians to safety amid enemy fire. The rescue was complicated by the fact that the villagers were not prepared for it and had to be found around the villages, he said. “There were crowds in front of them, and some civilians had gone back to their homes. Some had to be rescued from bomb shelters. They were in all sorts of places,” he said. At least 10 junta army personnel were killed during the clashes that took place over the two nights of the operation, according to the Bago Region Military Command. On the anti-junta side, 11 fighters were killed: nine from the NUG-commanded PDF and two from the KNLA. Despite the need for rapid planning and other challenges, the operation was ultimately a success, the Spring Warriors spokesperson said. “We are saddened and heartbroken by the loss of 11 comrades. But because we moved with unity and coordination, casualties were minimized,” he said. “We also relied on continuous highly accurate reconnaissance on enemy drones, which helped prevent more losses.” PDF fighters providing medical aid to civilians after the rescue(Photo: Spring Warriors Battalion) After the rescue Even with the hostages from the occupied village tract out of harm’s way, the state of conflict in Nyaunglebin Township and eastern Bago Region remained volatile, Saw Do Shin and other sources acknowledged. The army, which had withdrawn and regrouped during the rescue, moved at least 100 troops back into Yae Twin Kone the day after the operation and reestablished defensive positions there, according to local sources. "As far as we know, the enemy is stationed in Kyaung Kone, Yae Twin Kone, and Wet Che again,” a source close to the Bago Region Military Command said. “They are shelling the surroundings with artillery, drones, paramotors, and gyrocopters. There are small clashes daily.” Heavy shelling and drone strikes continued. A junta gyrocopter attack on March 11, three days after the hostage rescue, killed six civilians including two six-year-old children, in the village of Innbalar in neighbouring Shwegyin Township. The massacre of at least 28 civilians in this village tract is the third incident of brutal violence in Bago Region with comparable casualties since the 2021 coup. Military authorities killed about 80 people in a crackdown on anti-coup protesters in the city of Bago on April 9, 2021. The army burned at least 18 people to death, including children and an elderly woman, in the village of Nyaung Pin Thar in Bago Region’s Htantabin Township in May 2023. The junta has not released any public statements regarding these three events. "Rescuing over 300 people is no easy task; the lives sacrificed and the courage shown are matters of great pride,” NUG deputy human rights minister Aung Kyaw Moe said of the resistance rescue in Yae Twin Kone. “The vulnerability of children and women in these situations is far greater than others.” The deputy minister went on to praise the courage of the resistance fighters in Nyaunglebin Township, putting their own lives and risk and even sacrificing themselves to help civilians in danger. According to the NUG’s Ministry of Human Rights, the junta committed 520 massacres—incidents involving 5 or more deaths—killing a total of 5,505 people between the 2021 coup and mid-March of this year. Mass deaths from airstrikes have become especially common across the country, Aung Kyaw Moe noted.

The costly resistance operation that saved hundreds of civilian hostages

Resistance forces executed a daring rescue in a Bago Region village tract occupied by the military, braving artillery, drones, and bullets to lead civilians held captive by the military to safety

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