Junta troops brutally beat elderly woman, 5-year-old girl during raid on Mandalay Region village

In a violent raid on a village near Myitnge in Mandalay’s Amarapura Township on Tuesday, junta soldiers physically assaulted a 70-year-old woman and a five-year-old girl who are related to an area protest leader, locals told Myanmar Now. 

During the attack on the 600-household village of Thayet Tan, locals said that the soldiers forced around six residents to crawl on the ground and repeatedly hit them with sticks and rifle butts. The aforementioned elderly woman and child both suffered severe bruising to their backs, arms and thighs in the assault, according to photos seen by Myanmar Now. 

“They didn’t even spare the 70-year-old lady. The five-year-old child also has bruises all over her body,” another Thayet Tan villager said, adding that the two were likely targeted because they are distant relatives of a 34-year-old protest leader who is currently in hiding. 

Locals believe the raid on Thayet Tan was an act of retaliation for the bombing of a nearby telecommunications tower operated by Mytel—a company partly owned by the military—just days earlier on October 23. 

The local anti-junta People’s Defence Force (PDF) is suspected of perpetrating the attack, but no group had claimed responsibility for the incident at the time of reporting. 

“Everybody knows that the PDF has been blowing up Mytel towers. [The military] had no reason to terrorise civilians just because of that,” a Thayet Tan villager said. 

The first local from the community said that the village—located just two miles from Myintnge—may have been targeted because of its history of supporting the National League for Democracy (NLD), whose elected government was ousted in the military coup in February. 

“It could be said that the entire population of our village are NLD supporters. We even had a parade when the NLD won the election,” the local told Myanmar Now. “Our village was one of the places in Myitnge where [anti-coup] protests were the strongest. I think that’s why we are being targeted now.”

The army has been repeatedly “terrorising” the village since the coup, he added, forcing many of Thayet Tan’s residents to flee, including those involved in the protests.

He noted that the remaining family members of protesters are typically singled out and tortured during these attacks.  

Anti-junta resistance forces have also launched targeted attacks on suspected junta collaborators in the Myitnge area in recent months. A train engineer who was accused of informing the military council about other railway staff members taking part in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) was shot and killed in the town on October 5. 

Another railway officer accused of being a military informant was also shot dead in Myitnge one month earlier. Following his assassination, several villagers were reportedly beaten to the point of suffering broken bones during a junta raid on Thayet Tan. 

In May, Thayet Tan residents rallied to oppose the junta’s suppression of the anti-dictatorship movement, surrounding the Myitnge police station and demanding the release of detainees arrested during a crackdown on railway staff who were participating in the CDM’s general strike. 

Myanmar Now tried to call junta spokesperson Gen Zaw Min Tun to comment on the allegations of military assault and torture in Thayet Tan, but all calls went unanswered.