⁦ @amnesty⁩ has collected new evidence showing that indiscriminate airstrikes by the Myanmar military have killed civilians, including children, amid worsening armed conflict in the country’s Rakhine and Chin States. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/07/myanmar-indiscriminate-airstrikes-kill-civilians-rakhine/

Despite a sweeping mobile internet shutdown, Amnesty remotely interviewed more than two dozen ethnic Rakhine and Chin people affected by military operations, including airstrikes and shelling.

Two people from Chin State said an airstrike killed nine people in their community, including a seven-year-old boy. “Our family is destroyed,” the boy’s father said.

Witness testimonies also show that Myanmar soldiers arbitrarily detained civilians in Rakhine State for perceived connections with the AA, sometimes resorting to torture and other forms of ill-treatment.

One woman who visited her husband in detention said that he told her he had been tied up and beaten for four nights and five days. As a result of the beatings he now has trouble breathing.

A villager from Rakhine State’s Kyauktaw Township witnessed Myanmar soldiers arrest ten villagers, including her husband, on 16 March 2020.

“Until now I have no news about my husband, and I'm devastated,” she said.

Myanmar soldiers also appear to regularly confiscate or destroy civilian property and commandeer monasteries as temporary bases. Amnesty International similarly documented the use and confiscation of civilian property by soldiers in Rakhine State and northern Shan State in 2019.

Satellite imagery of several conflict-affected villages shows widescale burning consistent with Myanmar military tactics. Both the military and the AA have blamed each other for the village burning.

In one village tract in Minbya Township, a displaced person said that on 29 March Myanmar soldiers burned down around 10 houses and one school building, adding that two villagers died in the incident.

In Chin State, a 41-year-old ethnic Rakhine man who tried to return to his old village, Sein Nyin Wa in Paletwa Township, after being displaced for nearly two months reported seeing only ash from a vantage point on 24 May.

Amnesty was not able to document operations and abuses by the Arakan Army in the reporting period due to COVID-19 travel restrictions and limited access to conflict-affected areas and witnesses. But reports suggest it has continued a pattern of abuses previously documented.

This includes endangering the lives of civilians during attacks, intimidation of local communities, and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.

This is all happening during a sweeping mobile internet shutdown amid a pandemic.

“I’m worried because for war you can hide in the bush or nearby, but for the virus you can’t hide,” one person said. “It’s like we’re becoming deaf and blind.”

This conflict is fast becoming the world’s latest forgotten war.

“This relentless pattern of violations is clearly a matter for the ICC. The Security Council must act,” said Amnesty’s Nicholas Bequelin.