Myanmar soldiers attacked the village of Yay Shin, at the bottom of the furrows of the foothills of the Himalayas, just after dusk, descending with flamethrowers and heavy weapons.
Caught by the aging smuggled AK-47s from India and Thailand, members of a self-proclaimed People’s Defense Force returned fire so the rest of the villagers could throw themselves into the hills, several residents said by phone.
Eight bodies of villagers were later found, along with those of eight soldiers killed in battle. When battalions 77 and 99 left Yay Shin this month, little of the people of northwestern Myanmar remained, only burning ruins of a village that had dared to take up arms against the February coup. army.
Seven months after ousting Myanmar’s elected government, the country’s formidable army, known as the Tatmadaw, is stepping up attacks on largely improvised armed resistance and the villages where its members live. It is a pattern of killing that the Tatmadaw has inflicted for decades on various ethnic minorities, such as the Rohingya, the forced expulsion from the country that the United States considers an ethnic cleansing.
Now, Myanmar’s army is targeting a much wider segment of society, and its brutal campaign has spurred more robust resistance, even if civilians get caught again. Almost everyone who lived in Yay Shin is now encamped in a forest valley full of poisonous snakes, malaria and dengue, children crying from hunger and wet cold. According to members of the People’s Defense Force, residents of dozens of other villages in the Kalay region, an opposition stronghold in the army, have also fled into the jungle.
“We have already given our lives for the country,” Ko Zaw Win Shein, commander of the rebel company, said over the phone from a hiding place in the jungle as the crowd of army helicopters reverberated overhead. Zaw Win Shein, a former employee of a telecommunications company, needed nearly ten minutes to compose himself before his lightning whistles calmed down with a frightened whisper.
“We are more afraid of soldiers than of snakes,” he said.
Last week, just days after Yay Shin’s incursion, the National Unity Government – a shadow government created by opposition politicians – redoubled its call for armed insurgency, announcing that the “D-day”. Duwa Lashi La, its incumbent president, said in a video posted on social media that it was time “for a national uprising in all towns, cities and cities across the country at once.”
The video appeared to galvanize a population largely united against the military regime, which has killed more than 1,000 protesters and passers-by since the coup. Local militias shouted renewed battle cries, while Myanmar civilians expressed enthusiastic support on social media.
Major General Zaw Min Tun, a spokesman for the junta, dismissed the call to arms as “an empty statement.” But the Tatmadaw quickly increased its incursions into villages like Yay Shin, targeting dozens of them while searching for members of the People’s Defense Force, residents said.
On Thursday, the Tatmadaw descended on the village of Myin Thar, about 25 kilometers from Yay Shin, and gathered the men who had stayed to guard the community, armed with homemade hunting rifles. At least 17 of them, mostly boys, died with individual gunshot wounds to the head, said Ko Htay Win, a resident of Myin Thar who escaped into the forest.
“I am proud that he died defending the people,” said Ma Nyo Nyo Lwin, the mother of 18-year-old Ko Htet Naing Oo, who was one of the killers.
The National Unity Government has said it had no choice but to urge an armed rebellion. From the hideout, the shadow authority has not convinced any country to recognize it as legitimate and there is no hope that much will change when the UN General Assembly meets this week.
The United States and Britain have urged all parts of Myanmar to refrain from violence, as has a group of international experts.
“Violence is the cause of the suffering of the people of Myanmar, it is not the solution,” said Chris Sidoti, a former Australian human rights commissioner who is part of the group. “We empathize with the national unity government, but we fear what will happen as a result of this decision,” he added, referring to the call to arms.
Bags of armed rebellion have proliferated in Myanmar for months, from rural Buddhist center and ethnic minority-dominated border regions to cities, where the return of military government, after a decade of economic and political reforms, it has infuriated a young generation that had become accustomed to interacting with the outside world.
Thousands of civilians, some of them young city dwellers more familiar with video games than the actual war, have received secret military training. Along with ethnic rebels who have fought the Tatmadaw for decades, they have helped occupy the ranks of the People’s Defense Force.
The shadow government said the People’s Defense Force killed more than 1,320 soldiers in July and August. The statement was impossible to confirm, in part because the Tatmadaw does not release its own casualty numbers, so that the morale of its already low ranks plummets even further.
Following the proclamation of “D-Day” last week, the resistance sabotaged more than 65 telecommunications towers owned by Mytel, an army-linked company, said Ko Kyawt Phay, a spokesman for the People’s Defense Force in the central city of Pakokku.
On Thursday, an army convoy in Yangon, the country’s largest city, was attacked with grenades, a strike that many believe was also carried out by the People’s Defense Force. In recent weeks, killings in the shadow of local government officials and alleged informants have also disturbed people loyal to the military.
Much of the fiercest resistance takes place in remote regions where Tatmadaw artillery fire has driven entire villages into the forest. Large images taken on cheap cell phones show stunned families of Yay Shin squatting on the forest floor with some possessions scattered around them, such as a cooking pot and a sheet wet with rain.
“Now, I can only hear the sound of bombs and gunfire,” said U Zaw Tint, a Yay Shin carpenter. “These sounds stick in my head.”
Ma Radi Ohm, a university professor, is part of a civil disobedience movement that has deprived the military government of hundreds of thousands of educated workers for seven months, in the hope that administrative paralysis will break the board. So far, the military has only hardened its repression.
This month, Ms. Radi Ohm, protected by members of the People’s Defense Force, slipped into the forest to provide basic medical care to residents of Yay Shin and other villages in Kalay. He said at least 15 Yay Shin women are pregnant and one has suffered a mistake due to stress. In the absence of shelter, many people sleep under the trees and leave them trapped by mosquitoes.
The children have fallen ill with what Mrs. Radi Ohm believes to be dengue, although she cannot test it. Equally troubling, he said, at least 1,000 of the estimated 7,000 people in various jungle camps in Kalay show symptoms of Covid-19, such as loss of taste and low oxygen levels. Myanmar has been devastated by the Delta variant, and the army denies attention to those believed to support the resistance.
The distance between the forest fields is at least 10 miles. Mrs. Radio Ohm walks on foot, through swollen streams and down slippery paths in the rain. When Tatmadaw helicopters or drones fall over the canopy, villagers dive under pebbles or large trees, witnesses said. Military airstrikes have killed dozens.
“I just hope I can help some people die from disease and miscarriage,” Ms. Radio Ohm said. “It’s heartbreaking.”