AA says it has captured another military camp in Maungdaw Twsp

By DMG 10 Sep 2022

DMG Newsroom
10 September 2022, Maungdaw 

The Arakan Army has occupied a military camp of the Myanmar military’s Light Infantry Battalion No. 352 about three kilometres southeast of Jeitchaung Village in northern Maungdaw Township, Arakan State, the ethnic armed group said in a statement on September 10. 

The Arakan Army launched an attack on the military camp at 6:17 a.m. on Saturday and successfully captured it about an hour later, the statement said. 

Multiple junta soldiers were killed in the fighting, some soldiers were captured alive, and weapons and rounds of ammunition were seized, according to the AA statement. 

The Myanmar military carried out an airstrike involving two helicopters near the military camp, the AA statement added. 

DMG attempts to contact Arakan State Minister for Security and Border Affairs Colonel Kyaw Thura for comment on Saturday’s hostilities and the AA statement were unsuccessful as of press time. 

The AA previously captured a Myanmar military outpost near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border in northern Maungdaw Township on August 31, with the military attempting to retake control of it in the days that followed. 

For more than a week, the Myanmar military has been aggressively attacking areas around that outpost as well as other targets in Arakan State and Chin State’s Paletwa Township, with the help of airstrikes and heavy weapons, Saturday’s AA statement said. 

Myanmar’s military and the Arakan Army reached an informal ceasefire agreement ahead of the country’s November 2020 general election, after some two years of often-intense fighting in Arakan State and Paletwa Township. But the peace pact has verged on total collapse for weeks amid months of escalating military tensions and a series of clashes between the two sides across multiple Arakan State townships, and in Paletwa Township of Chin State.