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Army conducts clearance drive in Myanmar as civilians flee clashes

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COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh: Myanmar security forces intensified operations against Rohingya insurgents on Monday, police and other sources said, following three days of clashes with militants in the worst violence involving Myanmar’s Muslim minority in five years. The fighting — triggered by coordinated attacks on Friday by insurgents wielding sticks, knives and crude bombs on 30 police posts and an army base — has killed 104 people and led to the flight of large numbers of Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist civilians from the northern part of Rakhine state.


The violence marks a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered in the region since October, when a similar but much smaller series of Rohingya attacks on security posts prompted a brutal military response dogged by allegations of rights abuses.


The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Myanmar and classified as illegal immigrants, despite claiming roots there that go back centuries, with communities marginalised and occasionally subjected to communal violence.


“Now the situation is not good. Everything depends on them — if they’re active, the situation will be tense,” said police officer Tun Hlaing from Buthidaung township, referring to the Rohingya insurgents.


Rohingya villagers make up the majority in the area.


“We split into two groups, one will provide security at police outposts and the other group is going out for clearance operation with the military,” he said.


A Buthidaung-based reporter, citing police sources directly involved in events, said three police posts in northern Buthidaung had been surrounded by Rohingya insurgents.


Many houses had been burning since Sunday in parts of neighbouring Maungdaw town, another journalist and a military source in Maungdaw said.


A Rohingya villager in the area said the army attacked three hamlets in the Kyee Kan Pyin village group with shotguns and other weapons, before torching houses.


“Everything is on fire,” he said by phone. “Now I’m in the fields with the people, we’re running away.”


A military source in Rakhine state confirmed that houses were burned in the area but blamed the insurgents, who he said opened fire when soldiers came to find them and clear landmines.


The insurgents fled, he said, adding there were no casualties.


The Myanmar military reported clashes over the weekend involving hundreds of insurgents, taking the death toll to at least 104, the majority militants, plus 12 members of the security forces and several civilians.


There were no official updates from the army or the government on Monday.


The unrest has exposed the dark side of Myanmar’s historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of strict military rule that ended when the generals stepped back from direct rule in 2011.


The following year, hundreds of people, most of them Rohingya, were killed in communal clashes in Rakhine state and about 140,000 people were displaced.


In neighbouring Bangladesh on Monday, border guards tried to push back refugees stranded in no man’s land near the village of Gumdhum. Reporters have heard gun fire from the Myanmar side in the last three days. — Reuters


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