Daw Nant Mai woke up to the deafening sound of explosions as her body bounced into the air. She realized immediately that her village was being bombed.
That thought was followed by physical terror.
“I tried to get up from the bed, but I was trapped under rubble and couldn’t move,” she recalled in horror and shock.
She was not alone. The village hit by junta bombs was home to 168 families of internally displaced persons (IDPs).
They still don’t know what hit them: bombs from the sky or shelling from the ground?
Mung Lai Hkyet Village is about two miles north of Laiza Town, the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which resumed fighting the junta’s military after the 2021 coup.
Several hundred internally displaced persons (IDPs) had called the village home before it was turned into rubble. Residents and volunteers say the village was obliterated in the blink of an eye shortly before midnight on Monday.
At least 29 people, including 13 children—one was just one-and-half-years old—lost their lives, while another 57 people were also injured in the attack, according to the KIA.
“Fourteen men and fifteen women were killed by junta shelling. Eleven children under the age of 16 were among the victims,” KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday afternoon.
The death toll is expected to rise as volunteers clear more debris and rubble from the site.
Monday’s near-midnight bombing of IDPs occurred 13 days before the first anniversary of A’Nang Pa Village massacre when when junta warplanes bombed a concert being held to mark the 62nd anniversary of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).
That massacre was in Hpakant Township on October 23 last year.
Naw Bu said the KIA—the armed wing of the KIO— is investigating how the IDP camp was bombed because no sound of aircraft was heard. They are looking into whether junta troops used drones to bomb the IDP camp near the Chinese border, he said.
“Bombing civilian villages and displacement camps are war crimes,” Naw Bu said.
“We won’t take an individual action [in retaliation to] this incident. As a revolutionary institution, we are committed to achieving our destiny through the ongoing revolution,” he added.
Junta spokesman Major-General Zaw Min Tun denied the allegations on Tuesday, saying it had not carried out any attack near the Myanmar-China border.
“More than 30 bodies were discovered under piles of debris. Children aged 1.5, two, three, four and seven years old were among the victims,” a Kachin human rights activist told the Irrawaddy on Tuesday.
“I feel utterly saddened and disheartened by this tragedy. I have been living in Mon Lai Khat … since 2011,” said Daw Nant Mai, a mother of two children who survived.
Kachin News Group posted a video on Facebook showing an infant found alive in the rubble. The infant’s parents, however, were both killed in the bombing.
“Four children, including the infant, lost their parents. One of the children is currently undergoing surgery,” a volunteer said.
Survivors of the massacre are sheltering at their relatives’ homes in nearby villages and community halls near Laiza.
“We have nowhere to go now. We cannot return to Mung Lai Hkyet. It is not a safe place anymore,” a former resident said.
On Tuesday, Myanmar’s parallel National Unity Government condemned the junta bombardment of the IDP camp as a crime against humanity and a war crime. It called, once again, for the international community to take more aggressive action against the junta for targeted attacks on civilians.
