Two civilians in Khin-U and Shwebo were killed and three members of the resistance captured during weekend military raids in the central Sagaing Region townships.
The first victim, a 40-year-old man named Min Min from Nyaung Pin Gyi Su village on the eastern shore of the Mu River in Khin-U, was shot to death on Sunday evening.
Residents of Nyaung Pin Gyi Su fled when some 100 junta soldiers travelling from Shwebo arrived in the village that night, but Min Min returned to check whether the troops had left and was subsequently killed.
“He went in, thinking the military had gone,” Maw Taw, a resistance official for the village, said. “We tried to stop him and tell him that the military was still there but he wouldn’t listen.”
When the soldiers left on Monday morning, locals found Min Min’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, between the school and the police station. He was cremated that day.
Another resident of Nyaung Pin Gyi Su, 37-year-old Soe Tint, lost his right leg after stepping on a landmine placed in the centre of the village following the occupation. Local resistance groups claimed that the junta set up several explosives before exiting Nyaung Pin Gyi Su for Ywar Thit Kone, four miles to the north.
More than 10,000 people from at least 10 villages were displaced as they advanced.
Resistance forces repeatedly attacked the military column with their own explosive devices, reportedly causing three junta casualties. Myanmar Now was unable to independently verify this figure.
Three members of the resistance were shot and captured by another junta column in Shwebo that day at around 6am in the village of Bone Bweit, around seven miles south of the township’s administrative centre. Among them were Yam, 45, Maung Soe, 40, and a third man, all members of the anti-junta defence forces under the publicly mandated National Unity Government.
“Four people went back into the village to check the situation after half of the junta column left, but they ran into the remaining troops,” a resistance official from Shwebo said. “They were chased, shot and arrested. Only one of them escaped.”
At the time of reporting, the junta column was still in Bone Bweit, and it was not known if the men who had been detained were still alive.
Pro-military Telegram channels reported that a battle had broken out near Bone Bweit and that two members of the People’s Defence Force had been killed and two handmade rifles seized.
A military unit stationed outside of Shwebo city also fired heavy artillery into the area where the junta column was travelling on Sunday, killing one local man, identified as Soe Myint Win of Yin Bar village, located around one and a half miles northeast of Bone Bweit. A man and a woman from the community of Aung Chanthar were also injured when two shells detonated near their village, located around three miles northwest of Bone Bweit.
