Arakan Army says two strikes on Rakhine camps killed eight people in two days

Military airstrikes on camps for displaced people in Rakhine State killed eight people over two days, spokespersons for the Arakan Army and the Ponnagyun Youth Association said on Monday. Reuters could not independently verify the details. A government spokesperson did not immediately comment. The military has previously said it exercises maximum restraint to avoid civilian harm.

On Sunday, at about 5 p.m. local time, 10:30 GMT, a strike hit a camp in Ponnagyun township. The two groups said six people were killed and 11 injured. On Monday morning a second strike hit another camp in the same township, killing two and injuring two. Kyaw Win Tun, speaking for the Ponnagyun Youth Association, said everyone in both camps was a displaced civilian.

A week after Kyauktaw

The reports come a week after an aerial attack near a market in Kyauktaw, also in Rakhine, killed 50 people and wounded at least 58. That strike drew condemnation from outside the country. The new incidents are smaller in number and different in target: camps rather than a market. If the counts hold, Rakhine has had 58 deaths from three reported air attacks in eight days, 50 at Kyauktaw and eight in Ponnagyun. The injured add up to at least 71 across the three incidents, 58 at the market, 11 on Sunday and two on Monday.

Rakhine borders Bangladesh. The Arakan Army holds much of the coastal state. The military is trying to take territory back. Displacement camps sit inside that fight because people have already left villages. A camp is not a barracks. It is also not a site Reuters could film or count on Monday. The casualty figures rest on two local spokespersons who agree with each other and on a government that has not answered.

Why Ponnagyun is on the route

Ponnagyun sits inland from the state capital, Sittwe, on the road and river network the military has used to reach the north of the state. The Arakan Army has taken most rural townships since late 2023 and has pressed on Sittwe and the Chinese-backed port projects further south. Camps in Ponnagyun hold people who left villages when that front moved. Striking a camp does not take a township. It hits the people who have already fled one.

The military's older line, that it uses maximum restraint to avoid civilian harm, is the only official sentence available, and it was not issued about these two strikes. A spokesperson had not commented by the time Reuters moved the story on Monday. Silence is not a denial. It leaves the Arakan Army and the youth association as the only named sources for the dead and the injured.

The scale of the war underneath the two days

Myanmar's civil war began after the military seized power in February 2021. Reuters put the toll at about 100,000 dead and more than 3.5 million displaced. Rakhine is one front of that war, and it is the front that shares a border with the camps already holding Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Further displacement inside Rakhine adds to a population that has few routes out. The border is largely shut. People who leave a Ponnagyun camp do not have a legal crossing waiting for them.

The Arakan Army's interest in publicising civilian deaths is plain. It is fighting the military and it wants the strikes described as attacks on non-combatants. That interest does not invent a Sunday 5 p.m. time, a township name, or a second strike the next morning. It does mean the numbers should be read as claims until a hospital list, a burial count or a satellite image of the camp is public.

What can be said now is the sequence the two groups gave, and the absence of a junta reply. Six dead and 11 injured on Sunday in Ponnagyun. Two dead and two injured on Monday in a second camp. Fifty dead and at least 58 wounded a week earlier at Kyauktaw. A spokesperson who says both camps held only displaced civilians. A military that has not confirmed or denied these two strikes, and that rests on an older line about restraint.