Sawt Falasteen - Myanmar village air strike kills at least 12, says local official

Myanmar's military seized power in a 2021 coup which has plunged the country into a fractious civil war and analysts say the embattled junta is increasingly using air strikes to target civilians.

The Friday afternoon strike hit the village of Letpanhla around 60 kilometres (40 miles) north of the country's second biggest city of Mandalay.

The village in Singu township is held by the People's Defence Forces (PDF) -- anti-coup guerillas who took up arms after the military toppled the country's civilian government four years ago.

"A lot of people were killed because they dropped bombs on crowded areas," said the local administrative official, who asked to remain anonymous. "It happened at the time people were going to the market".

"We're currently making a list and have registered 12 people killed," he said on Saturday.

A junta spokesman could not be reached for comment and AFP could not independently verify the death toll. The local PDF unit reported there had been 27 fatalities.

- Wails of grief -

Witness Myint Soe, 62, said he tried to hide as an aircraft came in for a bombing run.

"I heard huge bomb blast sounds at the same time I was hiding," he said. "When I came out and looked at the market area I saw it was on fire."

In the aftermath, buildings which appeared to be homes and a restaurant were ablaze, as people in civilian clothing and camouflage uniforms doused the flames with water.

The limp body of a child with a bloody head wound was loaded into the back of an ambulance by a man whose uniform was marked with the PDF insignia.

Wails of grief could be heard as some of the crowd glanced up towards the sky.

Myanmar is now controlled by a patchwork of junta forces, ethnic armed groups and anti-coup partisans.

The number of military air strikes on civilians has risen year on year during the civil war, according to non-profit organisation Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), with nearly 800 in 2024.

That figure was more than triple the previous year and ACLED predicted the junta will continue to rely on air strikes because it is "under increasing military pressure on the ground".

"The military will persevere in its indiscriminate aerial attacks on civilian populated areas in an effort to undermine the opposition's support base and destroy their morale," it said in December.

An offensive by an alliance of armed ethnic groups in late 2023 inflicted stinging territorial losses on the junta.

But analysts say the Myanmar air force, which operates with Russian technical support, has been key to fending off its adversaries based mainly in the borderlands.

More than 3.5 million citizens are currently displaced and half the population lives in poverty.

C.Hamad--SF-PST