BANGKOK (AP) — A powerful ethnic minority armed group fighting Myanmar’s army in the country’s west said Monday it captured hundreds of government soldiers as it seized a key command post.
The Arakan Army, the well-trained and well-armed military wing of the Rakhine ethnic minority movement, has been on the offensive against army outposts in western Rakhine state – its homeland – for about six months.
The group said in a video statement posted on the messaging app Telegram that soldiers from the military government’s No. 15 Task Force headquarters in Rakhine’s Buthidaung township surrendered after a siege.
Buthidaung is about 385 kilometers (240 miles) southwest of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city.
The reported capture of the base could not be independently confirmed. Myanmar’s military government had no immediate comment and the spokesman for the Arakan Army did not respond to questions from The Associated Press.
The fighting in Rakhine is part of Myanmar’s nationwide conflict that began after the army overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021 and suppressed widespread nonviolent protests demanding a return to democratic rule.
Despite its advantages in weapons and manpower, Myanmar’s army has been on the defensive since October, when an alliance of three ethnic rebel groups launched an offensive in the country’s northeast.
The video released by the Arakan Army is said to have been recorded on Saturday. It shows Arakan Army fighters guarding men in military uniforms and civilian clothes, some of whom are injured, as they walk across a field and along a roadside accompanied by women and children – often families of soldiers live at their posts.
A caption accompanying the video said it shows the group’s deputy commander and his troops after a “final attack in which (they) faced complete defeat and surrendered.”
The video does not specify the total number of captured soldiers and their family members, but in one section about 300 men can be seen sitting in rows in an open field.
In a statement released on Sunday, the Arakan Army said it captured the command post on Thursday after two weeks of attacking it. It was claimed that another army post was occupied the next day, along with others in the past two months.
The attackers captured “weapons, ammunition, military equipment and handed over prisoners of war,” the statement said.
Some parts of the video released on Monday show young men who appear to be members of the Muslim Rohingya minority.
Myanmar’s military has been accused of trying to replenish its depleted ranks in Rakhine with Rohingya men under a recently enacted conscription law. The army has lost personnel to casualties, surrenders and defections while facing increasingly stiff resistance on the battlefield.
The Rohingya were the target of a brutal counterinsurgency campaign of rape and murder that saw an estimated 740,000 people flee to neighboring Bangladesh when their villages were burned by the army in 2017.
Ethnic Rakhine nationalists allied with the Arakan Army were also among the persecutors of the Rohingya minority, but now the Arakan Army and the Rohingya are uneasy allies in resistance to the military government.
The Arakan Army, which is seeking autonomy from Myanmar’s central government, is part of an alliance of ethnic minority armies that launched an offensive in October and seized strategic territory in northeastern Myanmar on the border with China.
His success was seen as a major defeat for the military government and boosted the morale of restive ethnic minorities and the pro-democracy resistance.
On Sunday, the Kachin Independence Army, another major ethnic armed group, said it had captured Sumprabum, a township in northern Kachin state.