A nine-year-old child was among at least seven people killed during a junta raid on the village of Mone Hla in northern Khin-U Township last week, according to resistance sources.
The village was attacked from both the ground and the air last Wednesday as part of a wider offensive targeting several neighbouring Sagaing Region townships.
The bodies of all seven victims were recovered after junta troops left the village on Thursday evening, sources said.
Six of the dead were resistance fighters from southern Khin-U Township who were unable to retreat after fighting broke out, the leader of the village’s defence team told Myanmar Now.
“They weren’t from around here, so they didn’t know the area that well. They couldn’t get out once the airstrikes began and got trapped in the eastern part of the village,” he said.
The child who was killed was shot dead from a helicopter while herding cows, he added.
Another army column also killed a 14-year-old boy in the village of Kan Tharyar, about 15km southeast of Mone Hla, on the same day, according to local residents.
According to the Mone Hla defence team leader, the column responsible for the raid on the village consisted of around 80 regime soldiers based in Kar Boe, a village in Kanbalu Township.
It was the same column that raided and torched the predominantly Muslim villages of Kyi Su and Kyauk Taing the day before, he added.
He also claimed that his defence team inflicted heavy casualties on the regime forces as they left the neighbouring village of Pin Sein Khin in Ye-U Township before reaching Mone Hla.
“We attacked them with explosives and killed seven of them. We also opened fire on them when they tried to recover the bodies, killing 15 more,” he said.
Forced to pull back to Pin Sein Khin, the junta troops opened fire with heavy artillery, killing a 40-year-old woman named Mya who was trying to flee the conflict, he added.
After reaching Mone Hla in the evening, the regime forces burned down roughly a third of the village, according to a resident who returned over the weekend.
“The village is now in complete ruins. They even destroyed the high school,” he said.
Mone Hla was also targeted by airstrikes in July, when three helicopters fired artillery shells at the 700-household village, reportedly hitting a local church and other religious buildings.
The village is the birthplace of Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, the Catholic Archbishop of Yangon, who in May of last year appealed to the military to refrain from targeting religious sites after four people were killed by artillery fire while sheltering inside a Catholic church near the Karenni (Kayah) capital Loikaw.
Despite continuing attacks, however, he appeared in public with junta leader Min Aung Hlaing during last year’s Christmas holidays, provoking a strong outcry from critics.
The cardinal, who was elected by Pope Francis in 2015, has met with the junta chief twice since the military seized power in February 2021.
