Flag of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. XUFANC/WIKICOMMONS
Kokang rebels say they have beaten back a government assault on one of their mountain bases in Shan State, killing almost 100 soldiers and taking their weapons, photos of which were later uploaded to Facebook.
Htun Myat Lin, a spokesman for the Kokang’s Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, or MNDAA, told the Irrawaddy that an artillery bombardment began early Thursday and was followed up by troop movements a few hours after sunrise.
Clashes went on well into the evening.
“We had fighting the whole day and even at night [on Thursday]. They stopped attacking us at midnight. Many of them were killed: 90 of them were killed from our estimates at three places and over 100 of them were wounded,” Htun Myat Lin told the magazine, adding that they captured injured soldiers.
Further detailing the exploits of rebels in ways that make the average human being recoil in horror, he said they seized several kinds of arms from the dead and wounded, crowing that “we even got 50 machine guns normally carried by the army.”
But the Kokang have their limits, as it were. While pictures of the weapons made their way onto Facebook, rebels were told not to post photos of dead bodies, because Burmese people “will think the Kokang are very brutal if they see such photos.”
“I told them not to post photos of dead bodies because I am worried this fighting will become a racist problem,” he said separately.
The government has not confirmed the losses.
Fighting started on February 9 when the Kokang, an ethnic Chinese faction with roots in Burma’s now-defunct Communist Party, attacked government outposts in Laukkai, an administrative center near the Chinese border.
Since then, 126 soldiers have been killed, while the body count on the rebel side stands at 74, the Irrawaddy reported, citing state media.
Reader Interactions