Myanmar troops killed more than 28 people in monastery attack

• Local aid organizations say that thousands of people have also been displaced due to this fighting.
• A civil conflict that has been raging in Myanmar for years intensified following the coup in 2021.
• 1.5 million people have been displaced.

An insurgent group claimed that the Myanmar army killed at least 28 persons at a monastery in southern Shan State.

The Nan Nein hamlet was shelled by troops on Saturday, according to the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF).

Since the junta’s coup two years ago, Myanmar has witnessed an increasing number of deadly clashes between its military and armed resistance organizations.

The area between the capital Nay Pyi Taw and the Thai border has seen some of the fiercest combat.

After the shelling on Saturday around 16:00 local time (09:30 GMT), the military’s air force and artillery entered the village and killed any civilians they discovered hiding inside a monastery, according to the KNDF.

Three of the bodies, which were among the at least 21 bodies piled up against the monastery in a video from the KNDF, one of the numerous ethnic armies that have entered the struggle against the military government. The bodies looked to have been shot multiple times. The footage also reveals numerous bullet holes in the monastery’s walls.

According to a KNDF spokesperson, who was cited in the local newspaper The Kantarawaddy Times, “It was like the [military] forced them line up in front of the monastery and brutally shot them all, including the monks.”

The group informed the BBC that it had discovered the remaining seven corpses close by in the small village.

In what the KNDF has claimed was a military assault on the hamlet, some of the nearby structures and residences were also set on fire.

Aerial destruction of Myanmar’s brutal civil conflict

She dealt with the opposition, and it cost her her life.

According to the organization, the villagers had thought that finding refuge with the area’s well-respected monks might ensure their safety. Before the soldiers came, other villagers in the village had left.

It is difficult to confirm the incident’s specifics, but the brutality of the assault on unarmed civilians is not new in this region of Myanmar, which has seen some of the heaviest anti-military junta protests since the coup.

According to the KNDF, fighting and clashes have gotten worse since February 25 as junta troops have pushed into the Nan Nein region and its monastery.

The junta thinks that Nan Nein’s location on the main road connecting Shan and Kayah states is essential for the flow of weapons to the rebel groups battling them.

The Pa-O, Shan, and Karenni populations are intermingled and occasionally at odds with one another in this region.

In the region, the Pa-O National Organization and its armed branch are very pro-junta. Locals claim that the army has increased efforts to strengthen pro-junta ethnic militias in the area to counter the opposition’s dominance of the territory.

According to observers, assaults and counterattacks in recent months helped set the stage for the escalation on Saturday.

“The Karenni groups have taken some villages and so the Myanmar military is now shelling them,” a village official near the military outpost of Saung Pyaung told the local The Irrawaddy newspaper.

Local aid organizations say that thousands of people have also been displaced due to this fighting.

The military leaders in Myanmar had hoped to conduct elections this year because they thought it would lend their government some much-needed legitimacy.

However, despite using heavy aerial bombardment in recent months, they have not been able to crush resistance to their rule, which has made having an election all but impossible.

A civil conflict that has been raging in Myanmar for years intensified following the coup in 2021.

Eight million children are no longer in school, 1.5 million people have been displaced, 40,000 homes have been destroyed, and the UN estimates that 15 million people are critically food insecure.

According to the monitoring organization Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than 2,900 individuals have died as a result of the junta’s crackdown on dissent.

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