Many of the attacks targeted the central region of Sagaing, the heart of the resistance. Last week, according to Radio Free Asia, four teenagers — two boys and two girls — were part of a group of nine unarmed civilians believed to have been detained and then shot dead by the military while on their way to medical school.
“Now that this has happened, I am devastated. I’m so numb and I feel like I have nothing inside,” said the mother of one of the teenage victims. “She wanted [volunteer]even though she was so young. She always said she wanted a part she could play.”
Images of more horror in the region also surfaced this month, when a soldier’s phone – apparently lost near the village of Mon Taing Pin – revealed rare photographic evidence of a massacre that took place in May.
Graphics obtained by RFA Burmese showed disheveled bodies and blood seeping into the ground as gunmen boasted of killing villagers with guns and knives.
‘We will cut their throats’
In a 10.5-minute video exchange, three soldiers viciously talk about how many people they’ve slaughtered and what they did to the bodies.
“You said you killed 26 people. How did you kill them? Just shoot them with a gun?” the owner of the phone asks his colleague.
“Of course we killed them with our guns,” he replies.
“For us, we even killed a lot by slitting their throats. I killed five myself,” said the owner of the phone.
The junta’s deputy information minister, Major General Zaw Min Tun, told RFA that authorities had opened an investigation into the matter.