A Myanmar military battalion fired light arms and heavy artillery at Kachin State’s Waingmaw Township for several hours on Tuesday night, allegedly unprovoked, according to a spokesperson for the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).
KIA information officer Col Naw Bu told Myanmar Now on Wednesday that the one-sided assault came from the junta’s Waingmaw-based LIB 58, and that it may have been a drill gone wrong.
“The military is known to practice drills. Maybe what happened yesterday was just a drill, and they started to get paranoid and shoot at each other,” he said of the soldiers within the LIB’s post.
A 50-year-old Waingmaw elder said that artillery shelling was heard from around 7:30pm, and the sound of small arms and machine guns began at 9pm.
“I couldn’t sleep for most of the night. My house was shaking because it is not far from the junta’s base that fired the weapons,” he said.
Houses in Labang village, also near the LIB 58 base, were hit by both bullets and shells, a man who lives near the battalion told Myanmar Now on the condition of anonymity. He said that a large artillery shell hit a pig farm, killing some of the livestock.
At around 10pm, a military helicopter flew over Waingmaw three times during the heavy shooting, while tanks and armored vehicles circled the town, residents said.
They reported hearing gunfire until around 3am on Wednesday.
By dawn, when it seemed the assault had stopped, people began moving around the town normally, they said.
Col Naw Bu said that at around 1am, while Waingmaw was under siege, the junta’s army fired six artillery shells at the KIA headquarters in Laiza. One reportedly exploded near a Covid-19 treatment centre near a residential area.
Between July 29 and 31, the KIA attacked at least six of the junta’s military bases in Kachin and northern Shan states. Kachin forces also intercepted and attacked the junta’s military convoys operating in Kachin State.
“There were confrontations between local troops from the two sides. Fighting broke out in Hpakant, too, but it was a confrontation while the military council’s troops moved,” Col Naw Bu explained.
The KIA ambushed a convoy entering the Nam Si En area of Hpakant on July 30, with some junta troops reportedly killed in the attack.
On the same day, two military bases near Laiza fired artillery at the KIA headquarters.
The army posts recently targeted by the KIA include four in Mogaung Township: two bases near Nanmati town, a checkpoint, and the Military Operations Command headquarters. In Waingmaw, they have attacked LIB 58, and in northern Shan State two bases along the Muse-Kutkai highway.
The junta has issued daily reports on its efforts to crush resistance but has not recently acknowledged the ongoing fighting in ethnic states.
Details of casualties on both sides are unknown, but locals have reported that civilians have been killed by the junta’s artillery shell fire in Waingmaw and Nanmati.
