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‘A War Crime’: Myanmar Airstrikes on Junta Opponents Kill at Least 30 Children

12-4-2023 < Global Research 29 531 words
 


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More than 100 people including at least 30 children were reportedly killed Tuesday in airstrikes by Myanmar’s military dictatorship targeting opponents of the coup regime.


Witnesses and members of the opposition National Unity Government told reporters that a military jet and Mi-35 helicopter gunship bombed and strafed a gathering marking the opening of a new office of the People’s Defense Force (PDF), a militant resistance group, in the village of Pa Zi Gyi, Kanbalu Township in the country’s northwestern Sagaing region.


“This was a war crime,” Byar Kyi, a resistance fighter who helped recover victims’ bodies, told The New York Times. “The place they attacked was not a military target.”


Tom Andrews, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, tweeted:


“The Myanmar military’s attacks against innocent people, including today’s airstrike in Sagaing, [are] enabled by world indifference and those supplying them with weapons. How many Myanmar children need to die before world leaders take strong, coordinated action to stop this carnage?”




One villager told the BBC that the jet bombed Pa Zi Gyi at about 7:00 am local time, followed by a sustained 20-minute attack by the helicopter.


Local residents and journalists uploaded gruesome photos and videos showing dead and dismembered children, many of their bodies burned or blasted beyond recognition, lying strewn about the bombed-out village in the wake of the attack.


“The corpses cannot be identified since they are all scattered in body parts—legs and heads,” one rescue worker told The Irrawaddy, an anti-junta news site. “After gathering them all, we burned them.”


A resident of a neighboring village told the same publication that “at the moment it’s hard to say exactly how many casualties there were.”


“We haven’t been able to retrieve bodies and body parts, as the area where the air strike occurred is still burning,” they added.


Regional media also reported at least 11 deaths in a Monday airstrike on a high school run by the Chin National Defense Force in Falam Township, Chin state.


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