Four years after the coup against a democratic government that plunged Myanmar into civil war, the military has inflicted terrible suffering on civilians. Torching of villages, indiscriminate air strikes and stomach-churning atrocities have become commonplace. Even the military’s own rank and file are paying a price.
Ethnic rebels on Monday seized an airport in northern Myanmar near the Chinese border, cutting off a supply channel for a key military base in the region, according to residents and rebel sources.
The Myanmar military killed 19 people including 14 members of an insurgent militia in an air attack on a rebel position, the militia said, as the junta presses on with operations aimed at recovering territory it lost last year.
The Myanmar military killed 28 of its own soldiers and their detained relatives in an airstrike on insurgent positions near an ancient capital in Rakhine state, according to the rebels and a human rights group.
The Arakan Army has seized a police station in the Ayeyarwaddy region, the first in Myanmar’s heartland to fall to the ethnic Rakhine rebels since the 2021 military coup.
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 rulers have ordered rolling blackouts in Myanmar’s two major cities — Yangon and Naypyidaw — cycling off power in different areas for longer periods to manage electricity demand and prevent a total grid collapse, electricity officials said.
Nearly 65,000 Rohingya have crossed into southeastern Bangladesh since late last year amid unrest and violence in Rakhine, their home state in neighboring Myanmar, according to newly updated information from Bangladeshi officials.
Myanmar’s junta is preparing to send migrant workers to Russia, following a request from the country as it faces shortages of foreign workers in agriculture and manufacturing amid its war with Ukraine, a Myanmar employment official said.
territory lost to anti-junta fighters and killed 11 villagers in its latest assaults, a pro-democracy militia member said on Thursday, after two ethnic minority forces agreed to ceasefires, leaving their pro-democracy allies on their own.