Two children among eight killed by Myanmar junta airstrikes in Sagaing Region

Attacks by the military council’s air force killed at least eight civilians including two children in resistance-held townships of Sagaing Region this week, according to local sources and resistance fighters. Seven of the eight slain civilians were killed on Tuesday in Ye-U and Kawlin townships. A junta warplane bombed the village of Tin Tein Yan in Ye-U Township that day, killing a local woman, her six-month-old daughter, and a six-year-old boy instantly. “We cremated the deceased immediately,” a man Tin Tein Yan said, explaining that the remains were severely damaged, with the heads and faces damaged past recognition. Two other women in the village also sustained injuries to their legs, he added. The airstrike on Tuesday was the second to have occurred in the area in the past few days, according to locals. One villager in communication with anti-regime forces said that the junta conducted an airstrike the previous Saturday targeting a crowded marketplace in Tin Tein Yan soon after a skirmish between resistance forces and junta troops in Depayin, some five miles to the south. The Saturday airstrike killed one woman and injured one man. Tin Tein Yan serves as a commercial hub in Ye-U Township, and was also the target of ruthless arson attacks by junta ground troops that destroyed more than 100 houses in 2022. It was largely deserted on Wednesday after residents fled, fearing the threat of further airstrikes, villagers said. “Some villagers stayed or returned home from fleeing after the first airstrike. Now, nearly everyone has left,” a Tin Tein Yan resident said. Villagers said there had been no additional fighting in the area between the two airstrikes. Rubble from junta aerial assaults in Tin Tein Yan, Ye-U Township (Photo: People's Defense Comrade group/Facebook) On Tuesday, the regime’s air force also struck villages in Kawlin Township, located around 80 miles northeast of Tin Tein Yan. Two men and two women died in Koke Ko Kone village around 13 miles southeast of Kawlin, a town recaptured by the military regime from resistance forces in March. “Bombs hit a house near a school in Koke Ko Kone at around 3:45pm. The victims were a driver, a market-goer, and a displaced woman,” a local woman said. The body of a girl recovered at the bombing site this morning is still unidentified, she added. On the same day as the deadly junta airstrikes, anti-regime forces led by the Kachin Independence Army captured the town of Pinlebu in northern Sagaing Region, some 40 miles northwest of Kawlin. The People’s Defence Forces—the armed wing of the publicly mandated National Unity Government (NUG)—have captured and temporarily held several towns in Sagaing Region, a hotbed of conflict in Myanmar since the 2021 coup. Apart from Kawlin, the towns have mostly been in Sagaing Region’s northern townships near the border with India.

Two children among eight killed by Myanmar junta airstrikes in Sagaing Region

The air force bombed villages in two different townships on Saturday and Tuesday, resulting in the deaths of two small children, four women, and two men

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