The military has responded to an insurgent offer of talks with even more airstrikes, residents say.
By RFA Burmese
The Myanmar air force has bombed a fishing village in Rakhine state killing 41 civilians and wounding 52, most of them Rohingya Muslims, residents involved in rescue work said on Thursday, in an attack insurgents condemned as a war crime.
Military planes bombed Kyauk Ni Maw village on the coast in Ramree township on Wednesday afternoon sparking huge fires that destroyed about 600 homes, residents said, sending clouds of black smoke up over the sea.
The area is under the control of anti-junta Arakan Army, or AA, insurgents but a spokesman said no fighting was going on there at the time of the air raid.
“The targeting of innocent people where there is no fighting is a very despicable and cowardly act … as well as a blatant war crime,” AA spokesman Khaing Thu Kha told Radio Free Asia.
Hla Thein, the junta’s spokesman for Rakhine state, told RFA he was not aware of the incident. Posters in pro-military social media news channels said Kyauk Ni Maw was a transport hub for the AA.
A resident helping survivors said medics were trying to give emergency treatment to the wounded amid fears that the air force could return at any time and let loose bombs and missiles.
“People are going to help them out and more are coming,” said the resident, who declined to be identified for safety teaspoons.
“We’ve been treating the injured since last night but we don’t dare to keep too many patients in the hospital for fear of another airstrike.”
The AA has made unprecedented gains against the military since late last year and now controls about 80% of Myanmar’s westernmost state.
On Dec. 29, the AA captured the town of Gwa from the military, a major step toward its goal of taking the whole of Rakhine state, and then said it was ready for talks with the junta, which seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat.
But the junta has responded with deadly airstrikes, residents say.
The military denies targeting civilians but human rights investigators an d security analysts say Myanmar’s army has a long reputation of indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas as a way to undermine popular support for the various rebel forces fighting its rule.
“The military is showing its fangs with its planes, that people can be killed at any time, at will,” aid worker Wai Hin Aung told RFA.
The bombing of Kyauk Ni Maw is the latest bloody attack on members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. About 740,000 Rohingya fled from Rakhine state to neighboring Bangladesh following a bloody crackdown by the military against members of the largely stateless community in August 2017.
Over the past year, Rohingya have suffered violence at the hands of both sides in the Rakhine state’s war, U.N. rights investigators have said.
The AA took a hard line with the Rohingya after the junta launched a campaign to recruit, at times forcibly, Rohingya men into militias to fight the insurgents.
On Aug. 5, scores of Rohingya trying to flee from the town of Maungdaw to Bangladesh, across a border river, were killed by drones and artillery fire that survivors and rights groups said was unleashed by the AA. The AA denied responsibility.
Edited by RFA Staff.
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