Several dozen people, including many civilians, were killed on Sunday, October 23, by fire from Burmese army fighter planes on a rebel area of Kachin State, in the north-east of the country. Their target: the participants of a concert organized in a village located a few kilometers from Hpakant, a town famous for its jade mines, to commemorate the 62 years of existence of the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the independentist political formation of the ethnic group.
The targeted area of the village included a training camp for the 9th Brigade of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the military wing of the separatist organization. Several Kachin celebrities, singers and artists died during the attack, as well as many spectators among the public, and the commander of Brigade 9 of the KIA. The information filtered only Monday, October 24 on social networks, probably due to the disorganization caused by the attack, and Internet cuts. Videos and photos show a tangle of beams and overturned mopeds, as well as photos of horribly mutilated corpses stretched out on green tarps.
According to certain testimonies, impossible to verify, the army then blocked the site, preventing the wounded from being transferred to hospitals. Sources within the KIO advanced, Monday evening, the figure of 80 dead and more than a hundred wounded. The organization’s spokesman, Colonel Naw Bu, spoke of a “shocking attack” : “ The army dropped bombs not on a battlefield, but on the place where we were having a celebration with civilians”, he reacted. The junta’s information office confirmed on Monday evening that the attack on “the headquarters of the 9e brigadier » was a “necessary operation” in response to “terrorist acts”but that the reported number of deaths was “rumors”.
training camps
The KIO is one of the few rebel armed groups that had not signed the 2015 national ceasefire agreement, and was therefore still in conflict with the Burmese army at the time of the coup on 1er February 2021. She was one of the first to officially support, from June 2021, the National Unity Government (NUG), the underground administration created since to represent the overthrown government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The fearsome Kachin guerrillas trained some of the demonstrators in their camps who took up arms to join the resistance from the spring of 2021. Ella also took part in operations against the Burmese army with commandos directly affiliated with the NUG, in the Kachin State but also recently in the Sagaing region, in the center of the country, where the fighting is most intense.
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