Myanmar’s ruling junta yesterday said that it had recaptured a town on a trade highway to China from an ethnic armed group in the country’s war-wracked north.
Following a 16-day operation, “on 16 October, Tatmadaw reoccupied Hsipaw completely,” the state-run newspaper Global New Light of Myanmar said, referring to the military by its Burmese name.
Northern Shan State has been rocked by fighting since June last year, when an alliance of ethnic armed groups renewed an offensive against the military along the highway to China’s Yunnan Province.
Photo: AP
The Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) captured the last remaining military base in the town of Hsipaw in October that year after weeks of fighting.
Hsipaw is on a highway from Myanmar’s Mandalay to the China border, along which hundreds of millions of dollars of trade travels annually.
There were 28 clashes and “engagements” in the two weeks leading up to Hsipaw’s recapture, with the military “seizing 13 dead bodies of terrorists,” the newspaper said.
“The military council is committing war crimes against innocent civilians... whether by manpower, heavy weapons, drones or airstrikes,” the TNLA’s Department of News and Information said, adding that 29 people had been killed since the junta began its latest offensive.
Myanmar’s ruling junta has been fighting a myriad of ethnic armed groups and “People’s Defense Forces” opposed to its rule since it seized power in a February 2021 coup, ending a brief experiment with democracy.
Since the coup, the TNLA — one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed groups — has bolstered its control of a swathe of Shan territory, seizing about a dozen key towns and the country’s main ruby mining hub.
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