Residents and internally displaced persons in Myanmar’s war-torn Kayah state are facing a humanitarian emergency as junta forces confiscate food and medicine at dozens of security checkpoints along major land routes in the southeastern state as fighting there intensifies, local sources said
The United Nations World Food Program announced on Friday that it will cut food aid to Bangladesh’s Rohingya starting in March because of funding shortfalls and despite warnings from its own experts that malnutrition is pervasive in the refugee camps.
Myanmar’s junta has focused much of its military firepower on Kayin state, carrying out 57 airstrikes on two key areas in January alone, highlighting the strategic importance of the area bordering Thailand rife with armed resistance groups and political opponents in hiding.
A rapid expansion in illegal gold mining since the military coup is poisoning the water supply in Myanmar’s Kachin state and destroying the livelihoods of residents who say the ethnic Kachin group that administers the region has failed to police the sector.
Ethnic Chin soldiers claim to have taken control of nearly all of Thantlang township in Chin state, in western Myanmar near India, despite the junta’s recent declaration of martial law in the area, but residents who fled fighting say they cannot return home amid the risk of military airstrikes.
Despite attempts by ASEAN to mediate, according to human rights groups, atrocities are still continuing in Myanmar two years after the military takeover.
More than 2,000 villagers in Myanmar’s northern Sagaing region fled ahead of two days of junta raids, the Kyunhla-Kanbalu Activists Group told RFA on Tuesday.
At least 363 women killed by the junta in the two years since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup, according to Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).
A 12-hour gunfight and the torching of a refugee settlement along the Banglesh-Myanmar border thrust the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, an old armed insurgent group, back into the spotlight.
Junta leaders placed Myanmar under six more months of emergency rule on Wednesday, the second anniversary of their ouster of the civilian government in a coup, citing ongoing resistance to army rule, junta-controlled media reported.r