Five police officers and seven insurgents were killed during a series of coordinated attacks against police in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, authorities said.
At least 20 police outposts and an army base were targeted. Authorities alleged that an estimated 150 insurgents attempted to storm the base but “soldiers fought back. Fighting remains in some locations and a combined forces of the Tatmadaw (Myanmar armed forces) and police forces are still waging an attack against the extremist terrorists,” the State Counselor Office’s Information Committee said on Facebook.
The violence erupted hours after the release of a long-awaited report into the treatment of “Rohingya” (An insurgent group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, formerly known as Harakat al-Yaqeen or “Faith Movement”) by the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, led by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Violence in Rakhine State has occurred in fits and started in the recent years, with the latest outbreak beginning in the wake of numerous attacks by militants on several government border posts in October 2016.
The Myanmar military responded with a series of security operations to find what it claimed were terrorists hiding among the Rohingya population.
Thousands fled across the border to neighboring Bangladesh, where refugees told stories of their villages being burned, mothers and daughters being raped and friends being summarily executed.
The attack was significantly bigger than one in October 2016, which sparked the latest round of unrest in Rakhine State, according to Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson.
Rakhine State is home to Myanmar’s Rohingya community, ethnic Muslims who have long faced persecution in the Buddhist-majority country, especially from the country’s Buddhist extremists. The Rohingya are not formally recognized as citizens authorities referr to the group as “illegal immigrants” from neighboring Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country.
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