This incident report describes events occurring in Noh T’Kaw (Kyainseikgyi) Township, Dooplaya District. On November 2nd 2023, the State Administration Council (SAC) indiscriminately fired rounds of mortar into A--- village, Noh T’Kaw village tract, Noh T’Kaw Township, Dooplaya District. A mortar shell landed and exploded next to a villager’s house and injured Saw B---, a 20-year-old villager. Saw B--- sought treatment at Khoh Ther See (Thon Set Thon Hsu) hospital, Khoh Ther See village tract, Kaw T’Ree Township, Dooplaya District. Due to the ongoing armed conflict in the area, villagers had to flee and the school had to close.[1]

 

 

Part 1 – Incident Details

Type of Incident

[Indiscriminate shelling] SAC shelling injured a villager

Date of Incident(s)

November 2nd 2023

Incident Location

(Village, Township and District)

A--- village, Noh T’Kaw village tract[2], Noh T’Kaw Township, Dooplaya District.

Victim Information

Name

Saw[3] B---

Age

20 years old

Gender

Man

Ethnicity

Karen

Marital Status/Family   

Unmarried

Occupation

Plantation farmer

Religion

Christian

Position

[villager]

Village

A--- village, Noh T’Kaw village tract, Noh T’Kaw Township, Dooplaya District.

Perpetrator Information (Armed Actors)

Name(s)           

Rank

Unit

Base

Commander’s Name

Unknown

Battalion Commander

SAC Infantry Battalion (IB)[4] #283

Ther Ter camp

Aung Ning Lin

 

Part 2 - Information Quality

1. Explain in detail how you collected this information.

A soldier from Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA)[5] Battalion #17 and a  former local leader [first] informed a KHRG researcher of this incident. Later, a KHRG researcher conducted an interview with the father of the victim.

2. Explain how the source verified this information.

An interview was conducted with the victim’s father [who was present during the shelling incident].

 

Part 3 – Complete Description of the Incident

Describe the Incident(s) in complete detail.

On November 2nd 2023, fighting broke out between the Kawthoolei Army (KTLA)[6] and State Administration Council (SAC)[7] in Seik Gyi Town, Dooplaya District. After, SAC Infantry Battalion (IB) #283, based at Ther Ter camp, led by Battalion Commander Aung Naing Lin, indiscriminately fired rounds of mortar into A--- village, Noh T’Kaw village tract, Noh T’Kaw Township, Dooplaya District. At around 8 am, a mortar shell landed and exploded next to the house of a villager named Saw B---’s, and his knee was injured by the shrapnel of the mortar shell. The victim's father, Saw C---, explained: “There were four people, two of my children, one of my younger brothers and myself, staying together in the house when the incident happened. I have two sons; Saw B--- is my older son. [He was] injured by shrapnel from the mortar shell. He was injured on his right knee. After the incident happened, I had no idea what to do. I ran [in]to the village and asked for help from a former local leader [unidentified name]. He contacted the clinic [D--- clinic] in E--- village, Noh T’Kaw village tract, Noh T’Kaw Township, and organised a car to transport my son to the clinic. However, the clinic was unable to provide the treatment [as they lacked skills and resources to treat a severe injury].” Therefore, a health worker contacted the clinic in F--- village, Wa Ka village tract, Kru Tu (Kyonedoe) Township [run by the Karen Department of Health and Welfare (KDHW)[8]]. This clinic was also unable to provide the treatment [also due to lacking skills and resources for severe injuries]. Later, a health worker from F--- clinic contacted Khoh Ther See (Thon Set Thon Hsu) hospital, in Khoh Ther See village tract, Kaw T’Ree Township, and Saw B---’s father transported the victim to Khoh Ther See hospital. It cost approximately 1,000,000 kyat [475.82 USD][9], which included both treatment and transportation expenses.  

 

Saw B---’s injuries have recovered slightly, but he is still needing to go to the F--- clinic Kru Tu Township once a week for his wound to be treated. From the shelling, the victim's house and a two-wheeled tractor both sustained minor damages.

 

SAC soldiers have previously indiscriminately fired rounds of mortar into many locations in this area [following the 2021 military coup].[10] Mortar shells have been fired into A--- village three times, causing casualties in two out of these three occasions. When these previous shelling incidents were happening, some villagers fled from the village and were displaced to another area. Normally, villagers flee temporarily to places nearby when the SAC indiscriminately shells their village. The villagers then return when the attacks stop. The number of villagers who have fled recently because of these attacks [on November 2nd 2023] is higher than previously. The school in the village [also] had to close due to the insecurity. The villagers are still waiting for the situation to improve in order to reopen the school [as of November 17th2023].

 

Part 4 - Permission for Using the Details

Did the victim(s) provide permission to use this information? Explain how that permission was provided.

The victim and his father gave KHRG permission to use this information.

 

 

                    

 

Further background reading on the situation on indiscriminate shelling in Dooplaya District, Southeast Burma, can be found in the following KHRG reports:

 
Wed, 28 Feb 2024

Footnotes: 

[1] The present document is based on information received in November 2023. It was provided by a community member in Dooplaya District who has been trained by KHRG to monitor human rights conditions on the ground. The names of the victims, their photos and the exact locations are censored for security reasons. The parts in square brackets are explanations added by KHRG.

[2] A village tract is an administrative unit of between five and 20 villages in a local area, often centred on a large village.

[3] Saw is a S’gaw Karen male honorific title used before a person’s name

[4] An Infantry Battalion (IB) comprises 500 soldiers. However, most Infantry Battalions in the Tatmadaw are under-strength with less than 200 soldiers. Yet up to date information regarding the size of battalions is hard to come by, particularly following the signing of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA). They are primarily used for garrison duty but are sometimes used in offensive operations.

[5] The Karen National Liberation Army is the armed (KNLA) wing of the Karen National Union (KNU).

[6] The Kaw Thoo Lei Army (KTLA) was founded on July 17th 2022 by Brigadier-General Nerdah Bo Mya. Nerdah Bo Mya, former Commander-In-Chief of the Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO), was dismissed by the KNU in 2022. KTLA operates in two districts in Southeast Burma, in KNU-controlled areas, namely Mergui-Tavoy and Dooplaya districts. In Dooplaya District, they operate in alliance with resistance armed groups. KTLA battalions in Mergui-Tavoy District are in conflict with both SAC and KNLA troops.

[7] The State Administration Council (SAC) is the executive governing body created in the aftermath of the February 1st 2021 military coup. It was established by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing on February 2nd 2021, and is composed of eight military officers and eight civilians. The chairperson serves as the de facto head of government of Burma/Myanmar and leads the Military Cabinet of Myanmar, the executive branch of the government. Min Aung Hlaing assumed the role of SAC chairperson following the coup.

[8] The Karen Department of Health and Welfare (KDHW) is the health department of the Karen National Union. It was established in 1956 to address the lack of public healthcare resources in rural Southeast Myanmar. It currently operates a network of community-based clinics in the region, but its capabilities remain limited due to funding constraints.

[9] All conversion estimates for the kyat in this report are based on the official market rate of 1 USD = 2101.63 MMK as of February 28th, 2024 (taken from https://wise.com/gb/currency-converter/mmk-to-usd-rate)

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ဆက်စပ်ဖတ်ရှုရန်

ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - ကော်တရီမြို့နယ်တွင် ခြိမ်းခြောက်မှု၊ အဓမ္မစေခိုင်းမှု၊ လက်နက်ကြီးရမ်းသမ်းပစ်ခတ်မှုနှင့် လုယက်မှု (၂၀၂၃ခုနှစ်၊ မတ်လ ၁၅ရက်)
ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - နို့တကော (ကြာအင်းဆိပ် ကြီး)မြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ လက်နက်ကြီးပစ်ခတ်မှုကြောင့် ရွာသားတစ်ဦးသေဆုံး (၂၀၂၃ခုနှစ်၊ ဇွန်လ)
ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - နို့တကော (ကြာအင်းဆိပ် ကြီး) မြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ လက်နက်ကြီးပစ်ခတ်မှုကြောင့် ဒေသခံရွာ သားတစ်ဦး ထိခိုက်ဒဏ်ရာရရှိ (၂၀၂၃ ခုနှစ်၊ နိုဝင်ဘာလ)
ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - နို့တကောမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ ရွာသားတစ်ဦးအား ပစ်ခတ်၍ ဒဏ်ရာရရှိ (၂၀၂၃ခုနှစ်၊ အောက်တိုဘာလ)
ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ- ကော်တရီမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC လေကြောင်းတိုက်ခိုက်မှုကြောင့် အသက် ၁၁ နှစ်အရွယ် ယောက်ျားလေးတစ်ဦး နှင့် ကိုယ်ဝန်ဆောင်အမျိုးသမီးတစ်ဦး ထိခိုက်ဒဏ်ရာရရှိ (၂၀၂၃ခုနှစ်၊ နိုဝင်ဘာလ နှင့် ဒီဇင်ဘာလ)
ဒူးပလာယာခရိုင် မှုခင်းဖော်ပြသည့်မှတ်တမ်းလွှာ - ကရူတူးမြို့နယ်တွင် SAC မှ ကျေးရွာအတွင်းသို့ လက်နက်ကြီးများပစ်ခတ်ခြင်းကြောင့် (၁၅) နှစ်အရွယ် ကလေးတစ်ဦးနှင့် ရွာသားတစ်ဦး ထိမှန်ဒဏ်ရာရရှိ (၂၀၂၃ခုနှစ်၊ မေလ)