An airstrike by the Burmese junta on a hospital in the west of the country left at least 31 dead, a humanitarian worker said on Thursday, December 11, as the army leads a vast offensive in the run-up to elections.
“The situation is terrible”said Wai Hun Aung, referring to a strike Wednesday evening by a military plane against the general hospital in the town of Mrauk U, in Rakhine State, near the border with Bangladesh. “There are 31 dead and we think there will be more. There are also 68 injured and there will be more and more”added the aid worker. Contacted, a spokesperson for the junta did not immediately respond.
According to observers of Myanmar’s civil war, the junta has intensified its airstrikes year after year after seizing power in a 2021 coup that ended a decade of democratic experiment.
The army has scheduled legislative elections from December 28, presenting them as a possible outcome to the conflict. But the rebels have promised to prevent the vote in the territories they control and which the junta is trying to reconquer.
A region under tension
Rakhine State is almost entirely controlled by the Arakan Army (AA), an armed ethnic group active long before the military overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
The group announced Wednesday evening in a press release that ten patients at the hospital had been “killed instantly” during the airstrike, which occurred around 9 p.m. (3:30 p.m. in France).
The AA has become one of the most powerful rebel groups in Myanmar’s civil war, alongside other ethnic minority fighters and pro-democracy supporters who took up arms after the 2021 coup. The scattered rebels initially struggled to make progress before three groups launched a joint offensive in 2023, putting the army in difficulty and pushing it to reinforce its troops through conscription.
The AA played a key role in this “Three Brothers Alliance,” but its two allied factions this year agreed to China-brokered truces, leaving it alone to fight. While the elections organized by the junta are strongly criticized by many countries and the United Nations, Beijing believes that they should contribute to “restore social stability” with his Burmese neighbor.
Although the AA has proven to be a formidable adversary for the junta, its ambitions remain largely limited to its home territory of Arakan, bordered to the south by the Bay of Bengal and to the north by forested mountains. The army, for its part, imposed a blockade on Arakan State, contributing to a “dramatic increase in hunger and malnutrition”according to the World Food Program.
