Three villages in Yinmabin Township in the anti-regime stronghold of Sagaing Region were burned down by the junta’s military forces between Aug. 18 and 21, leaving six civilians dead and forcing over 7,000 residents to seek shelter in nearby forest areas and in other villages, local residents and resistance groups said.
A junta military column comprising 200 troops formed in Yin Paung Taing Village in the west of the township a couple of weeks ago and traveled 22 km to launch the operation in the targeted villages.
When they reached Ka Paing and Thee Kone villages on Aug. 18, they torched houses and granaries. They returned the next day and torched more houses, the residents said.
As the military troops were torching Ka Paing Village, a 60-year-old man who had earlier suffered a stroke and was unable to run died in the fire, according to the residents, who added that the troops also killed five male detainees from Ka Paing and Thee Kone villages on Aug. 18 and 19.
“We left the village at 8 a.m. on [Aug. 18] as we had been informed that the column was getting near the village. We fled into the nearby forest and put up a tent, in which we lived with four other families,” said Ka Paing resident Daw Kyi Kyi, 42.
Daw Kyi Kyi and her husband are farmers, growing crops and raising pigs. However, they had to leave behind all of their possessions when they fled into the forest with their two daughters.
“We don’t dare to go back into the village. They could come back to the village at any time. And if they see us, they will just shoot and kill us right away,” she said.
Residents of nearby villages were providing them with some rice and cooking oil, she said.
“Our younger daughter is suffering from a fever as the weather is so cold here in the jungle,” she said.
Military troops and local resistance group fighters clashed from Aug. 18 to 21 in the northeast of Yinmabin Township, with intense fighting occurring in the areas near Ka Paing, Thee Kone, Ka Phyu, Paung Wa, Tha Louk, Win Kone and Ywar Sin.
“[The military] sent reinforcements by helicopter, and shot from the helicopters too. We fought them and had them surrounded, but they were able to move out from Yin Paung Taing, then entered these villages and destroyed them,” said a member of the Myauk Yamar People’s Defense Force (PDF).
Local PDF forces in Yinmabin collaborated in the operation to fight the military troops, tracking the column’s movements for days.
Ka Paing is a big village with over 800 houses, more than 200 of which were destroyed by the fires. Seven of Thee Kone’s more than 800 houses were burned down, while Paung Wa Village, which has about 200 houses, lost over 40 homes to the fires set by the military troops, according to the residents.
In total, at least 260 houses were destroyed by the military forces, resulting in over 7,000 people from the three villages having to take shelter in the forest and nearby villages, without enough food and medicine and other basic necessities.
The junta column reached the border area between Yinmabin and Kani townships on Wednesday, but residents of the three torched villages are afraid to go home. Even if they did, most will have lost their properties, and now face serious hardships supporting themselves, local PDF groups said.
According to figures from Data For Myanmar, a local research team, approximately 18,886 civilian houses were burned down by the military and its affiliated groups from Feb. 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022. Sagaing Region has been hit hardest with over 13,800 houses burned down as junta forces try to crush the area’s growing resistance movement, which sprang up after the military coup.
Armed clashes across Myanmar continue to affect civilians and trigger displacement. According to figures from UNOCHA, the UN’s humanitarian response agency, as of Aug. 1 there were an estimated 1.24 million internally displaced people (IDPs) across Myanmar, of whom some 897,000 have been displaced since the coup on Feb. 1, 2021.
Though the number of IDPs and villages burned down by the military continues to increase, junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has denied that his armed forces engage in torching villages, just as he denied—while meeting with Noeleen Heyzer, the UN special envoy on Myanmar, in Naypyitaw on Aug. 17—that his troops used the tactic during their campaign of terror against Rohingya communities in northern Rakhine State in 2017.
