Fierce clashes broke out in northern Shan State on Sunday and Monday as an ethnic Kokang armed group attacked a strategic junta base atop a hill in preparation for seizing Laukkaing Town, the administrative center of Kokang Self-Administered Zone along Myanmar’s border with China.
The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) said its troops attacked a large number of regime forces stationed on Four Buddhist Statues Hill outside Laukkaing on Sunday morning. The fight lasted eight hours and continued on Monday as MNDAA troops kept fighting to take the hilltop base.
“The MNDAA will have to attack junta hilltop bases step by step. They will take time to seize junta bases as they have already surrounded [Laukkaing Town] and the junta was unable to send reinforcements to the area,” a military analyst told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday.
Last Tuesday, The MNDAA seized Konkyan Township in the north of Kokang Self-Administered Zone after five days of attacks. An entire battalion of junta troops surrendered their base and weapons to the resistance groups. The township had been under the control of the junta for more than 30 years.
All 186 soldiers in the junta’s Light Infantry Battalion 125 – along with their family members, junta police, and pro-regime militia members – surrendered to the MNDAA.
The head of Operation Command Headquarters 16 and about 100 junta troops fled the resistance attack, but the MNDAA said it killed 100 of them and seized a large haul of weapons as they chased and attacked them up until last Friday.
The MNDAA said on Monday that its troops also chased and attacked junta forces that had fled after abandoning their bases in the northern part of the zone.
The new offensive for the hilltop outside Laukkaing came after the MNDAA and allied resistance groups seized more than 200 junta bases and several strategic towns surrounding Laukkaing Town in Shan State Special Region 1.
The MNDAA is one of three ethnic armies in the Brotherhood Alliance, which launched Operation 1027 on October 27, swiftly seizing a massive number of junta bases and towns in northern Shan and Rakhine states as well as in upper Sagaing and Mandalay regions. The two other members of the alliance are the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army.
People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) – the armed wings of the civilian National Unity Government – and other powerful ethnic armies have been following the Brotherhood Alliance by escalating attacks on regime targets and bases across the country to support Operation 1027.
Myanmar’s junta has suffered heavy losses of troops and territory nearly daily to PDFs and ethnic armies in every state and region except Ayeyarwady.