[ Radio Free Asia ] More Than 10,000 Displaced by Renewed Fighting in Myanmar’s Battle-Ravaged Chin State
More than 10,000 people have fled their homes in Myanmar’s Chin state amid renewed fighting between junta troops and anti-coup militias in the region, according to sources, who reported casualties from clashes on Tuesday.
A refugee told RFA that thousands had fled Mindat township to the surrounding mountains and jungle to escape the fighting, which resumed on June 3, but said the military had continued to target civilians, and was even firing artillery at camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Reports of the scale of the exodus on the western flank of Myanmar came as the United Nations called for urgent help to assist an estimated 100,000 people who have fled fighting in eastern Kayah state, saying insecurity and lack of access to remote parts of the region have hampered its efforts to provide aid.
As a result of decades of military conflict between the government military and ethnic armies that control most of the borderlands of the country of 54 million people, Myanmar had more than 500,000 IDPs at the end of 2020, two months before the military takeover, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a Norwegian NGO.
The members of the Chinland Defense Force (CDF) militia, a network of volunteers that formed in April, are taking on Myanmar’s army—the second largest in Southeast Asia—with slingshots and the same crude flintlock “Tumee” rifles their forefathers used to fight off British colonizers in the 1880s. The CDF said it had killed some 100 junta troops between March and May.
