While the central regions of Myanmar have continued to suffer from the aftermath of the March 28 earthquake, the Myanmar Air Force has increased its deadly air raids. At least twenty children and two teachers were killed on Monday, May 12, when a military aircraft dropped a bomb on a school at 9:40 am in the Sagaing region, in the Northwest of the country. Sixty children were injured. In September 2022, 30 kilometers away, soldiers strafed a school from a helicopter, killing seven children.
The village targeted on Monday, Oe Htein Kwin, is located in an area administered by the National Unity Government (NUG), the underground resistance government that took up arms against the junta following the February 2021 coup. The NUG’s Ministry of Education promised “severe judicial repercussions without mitigation or absolution” in a future free of the generals.
The region’s rural areas were already suffering from supply difficulties due to the fighting, which were exacerbated by the disaster. Above all, the truce, announced on April 2 by the junta in areas affected by the earthquake and recently extended until the end of May, has been called “entirely fictitious” by the NUG. “The military has conducted uninterrupted bombings since March 28; we have counted 380 across the country, resulting in at least 360 deaths. They target schools, clinics,” Zaw Kyaw, the spokesperson for the NUG presidency, told Le Monde on May 14. Approximately 50% of these air raids, he said, took place in the Mandalay and Sagaing regions – the provinces around the cities most affected by the earthquake.
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