The Myanmar military council carried out an unprovoked airstrike on Wonekon village in Mindat Township, Chin State, leaving more than 100 children with no school to attend, according to people helping the displaced.
The attack damaged several classrooms in the village school, which teaches up to secondary level, and they urgently need to be restored, they said.
“Students no longer have the opportunity to attend school. The entire school building has been damaged. The school was bombed exactly four times. The village is not far from our village. When the village was bombed, I also had to flee and hide. If it had happened on a school day, almost all of them could have been killed. We were lucky it happened on a holiday,” said Ko Law Ram, the head of the management committee of the camp for internally displaced people in Mindat Township.
The military regime attacked Wonekon with two 500-pound bombs, four cluster bombs, rockets and 0.5 bullets. The Infantry Battalion 274, based in Mindat, fired four rounds of artillery, IDP aid workers said.
The junta’s airstrike on the village killed three civilians, including a child and a nursing mother, seriously injured one person, and damaged about ten houses.
Currently, about 200 residents are living in Wonekon, including about 40 others from other villages who still dare not enter their homes for fear of the regime’s airstrikes, they said.
In this fear, the villagers have organised the burial of the three victims outside the village and are currently living on farms in the mountains, according to reports. The displaced people are in a difficult situation and need humanitarian assistance.
They are trying to provide financial support as transportation is not easy and donations are needed, IDP aid workers in Mindat said.
The IDP management committee in the township said that they are trying to provide humanitarian aid to Loke Khay village, which was bombed by fighter jets on 28 June, and that they had distributed 50 million kyats to those affected by air and ground attacks by the Myanmar military in six months in 2023 in Mindat Township.
Sent by KMG.