An ethnic armed group in western Myanmar claims to have captured tons of of Myanmar navy troopers after taking management of a significant command publish near the border with Bangladesh.
In a video assertion posted to the Telegram messaging app yesterday, the Arakan Military (AA) mentioned that troopers belonging to the headquarters of the fifteenth Army Operations Command (MOC-15) in Rakhine State’s Buthidaung Township had surrendered to its forces.
The video launched by the AA exhibits a number of hundred captives, a few of them in navy uniforms, others injured, strolling in a line throughout a discipline and down a muddy street. Most are barefoot. Later, the video exhibits what seem like AA troopers, armed with rifles, guarding a big group of males in an open discipline.
An English-language caption within the video says it exhibits the deputy commander of the MOC-15, his troopers, and their households after a “closing assault through which [junta] troopers confronted whole defeat and surrendered.”
In a separate assertion on Sunday, the AA mentioned that the headquarters of the MOC-15, one of many navy’s three MOCs in Rakhine State, was captured on Might 2 after a 12-day siege. The group captured “weapons, ammunition, navy tools, and surrendered prisoners of struggle,” the assertion added, based on The Related Press.
Because the AP and another media stories have famous, the AA’s video seems to indicate members of the Muslim Rohingya minority. The Rohingya have been topic to extreme repression for years, most significantly in 2017, when the navy, together with Rakhine vigilantes, launched a “clearance operation” that drove round 740,000 individuals throughout the border into Bangladesh.
Myanmar’s navy has reportedly begun drafting Rohingya males into its ranks below its lately activated conscription regulation, which stands to poison additional the ethnic and sectarian tensions in western Myanmar.
Whereas the autumn of the MOC-15 headquarters has not but been confirmed by the navy regime in Naypyidaw, its give up would mark the most recent in an extended collection of navy setbacks for the navy administration that seized energy in a coup in 2021.
The losses have been significantly dramatic in Rakhine, the place the AA has been on the offensive throughout Rakhine State since a year-long ceasefire collapsed final November. By March, based on an evaluation from the Worldwide Institute for Strategic Research, the AA had gained “main management” of eight of Rakhine State’s 17 townships, and one township in neighboring Chin State.
In early February, it overran the junta’s closing remaining outpost in Mrauk-U, the capital of the final unbiased Rakhine kingdom, which was conquered by the Burmese kings in 1785. The victory was extremely symbolic for the AA and its political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), which envisions the reestablishment of an unbiased Rakhine state. Just a few days later, it overran the ninth MOC headquarters in Kyauktaw Township, leaving simply certainly one of Rakhine’s three MOCs – the fifth MOC HQ in Toungup Township within the south of the state – below junta management.
In latest weeks, the AA and the junta have fought fiercely for management over Maungdaw and Buthidaung, the 2 northernmost townships of Rakhine State near the Bangladesh border, prompting tons of of Myanmar troopers and border police to flee throughout the border into Bangladesh. The AA additionally reportedly seized a border guard headquarters in northern Maungdaw Township late final week, based on The Irrawaddy.
The 2 sides are additionally vying for management of Ann Township, within the central a part of Rakhine, the bottom of the Myanmar navy’s Western Regional Army Command. The AA launched assaults there on March 24.
If confirmed, the autumn of the MOC-15 HQ would mark a major loosening of the junta’s maintain on Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, which the AA has now lower off from the remainder of Rakhine State. Ought to these townships fall below the AA’s management, it might then be capable of redeploy its forces towards the state capital, Sittwe, which remains to be below junta administration, or Ann Township, which sits on the crossroad of the freeway linking central Rakhine State to Magwe Area to the east.
The loss would even have appreciable political significance. The regime has misplaced simply two different MOC headquarters: the sixteenth MOC HQ in Hsenwi, northern Shan State, which was captured by the Three Brotherhood Alliance in January, and the ninth MOC HQ, which the AA captured in February. The Myanmar military has 21 MOCs, that are made up of cell infantry battalions and “basically act as fast response models,” based on Andrew Selth of Griffith College, an knowledgeable on the Myanmar navy.