On the night of October 9, Seng Mai was awoken by a deafening explosion that tore apart her shelter in Mung Lai Hkyet, a camp for conflict-displaced people in northern Myanmar’s Kachin State.
“The sound was so loud that I wondered whether I had even survived,” the 21-year-old told Al Jazeera.
As rounds of mortar fire thundered from the direction of a nearby military post, she crawled into a makeshift trench.
“A grandmother was crying and shouting for help. My mother was running barefoot,” she said. “Children were also running in the dark, struggling to reach a safe place.”
By the time the bombardment was over, 28 civilians including 12 children had been killed and dozens of shelters as well as a kindergarten and church were destroyed. Rights groups have blamed the military, which seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 and has so far denied responsibility for the attack.
It has an extensive record of targeting civilians and civilian areas, however, and its actions have only become “increasingly brazen” since the coup, according to a United Nations-appointed investigative mechanism. In August, the mechanism announced that it had found “compelling evidence” that the military had committed “more frequent and audacious war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
Bolstering this claim, a report published by the UN’s human rights office last month found that the military had killed at least 3,800 civilians, destroyed nearly 75,000 civilian properties and conducted nearly 1,000 air strikes in the more than two and a half years since the coup.
“Emboldened by confidence in impunity, military actions have grown in intensity and brutality,” said the report. “A seemingly endless spiral of military violence has engulfed all aspects of life in Myanmar.”
The ruins of a kindergarten that was hit in the military raid.
The recent attack on Mung Lai Hkyet targeted civilians displaced by war since 2011.
Several Kachin internally displaced youth, three of whom witnessed the Mung Lai Hkyet attack, told Al Jazeera the incident had left them traumatised and afraid. It also reinforced their sense that they had nowhere safe to run.
Source: Al Jazeera
BDST: 1013 HRS, OCT 19, 2023
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