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A border guard police outpost on the Maungdaw-Agnumaw highway. / The Irrawaddy
By The Irrawaddy 9 March 2023
4 border guard police based mostly in western Myanmar’s Rakhine State have abandoned their police outpost with their weapons. The 4 abandoned their base in Myin Lut Village within the south of Maungdaw Township, and junta troops are looking close by villages for them.
A village administrator from a village near Myin Lut advised The Irrawaddy: “I heard the 4 deserters had been new recruits who accomplished their coaching two or three months in the past. As they took their weapons, [regime soldiers] got here and searched potential escape routes and close by villages. I heard one of many deserters is Karen and the remaining are Bamar. [Junta troops] advised us to inform them instantly if we spot them in our villages.”
Locals speculate that the 4 deserters might need defected to the ethnic Rakhine armed group the Arakan Military (AA), who’ve bases within the close by Mayu Mountains. The Irrawaddy was unable to achieve AA spokesman U Khaing Thukha for remark.
One Maungdaw resident stated: “It received’t be straightforward for them to flee as none of them are locals. They’ll’t flee in the direction of the west as there may be solely the ocean there. And so they can’t flee alongside the highway as it’s dotted with border guard posts. To allow them to solely flee in the direction of the Mayu Mountains. It’s potential that they’ve taken refuge with the AA.”
He added: “The border guard police reckon that they attended police coaching as a result of they needed to get weapons, and fled quickly after the coaching was completed.”
There have been frequent desertions because the coup by army regime troopers and police in Rakhine’s Rathedaung, Maungdaw, Kyauktaw and Mrauk-U townships.
Final June, AA spokesman U Khaing Thukha stated that over 100 troopers together with officers had defected from the Myanmar army to the AA because the 2021 army takeover.
Myin Lut Village was a settlement of ethnic Rohingya individuals positioned some 15 miles from Maungdaw City. It was designated as a sub-township in 2016, however the whole village was razed in 2017 by the Myanmar army as a part of a so-called counter-insurgency operation that pressured a whole lot of hundreds of Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
The village has been empty since then, however in 2019-20 the army established a brand new border guard police base in Myin Lut.
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