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The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) attacked the junta’s armed forces with the support of the People’s Defence Force (PDF) after 200 soldiers from Infantry Battalion 40 approached the Kachin fighters stationed in Hopin sub township in Mohnyin District.
Twenty militants and nine soldiers were killed in recent days during insurgent attacks on two military bases in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province and the military’s response, the military said on Saturday.
The attacks, the biggest in recent years by ethnic Baloch insurgents, began on Wednesday night.
Wiro Nongganop says he commands a battalion of West Papua independence fighters, but he has no guns, only bows and arrows, and lives in exile in a bark hut, sometimes surviving on potato leaves.
Nongganop and a few members of his Muyu tribe fled their homeland in 2019, crossing the poorly marked Indonesian border for the relative safety of remote western Papua New Guinea.
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At least 2,500 people including hundreds of children have fled a flare-up in fighting between the Myanmar army and ethnic minority rebels and have taken refuge across the border in Thailand, Thai authorities and an aid group said.
Those displaced had poured into the Thai town of Mae Sot after fighting in the past few days between the Karen National Union (KNU) and Myanmar’s army, Somchai Kitcharoenrungroj, deputy governor of western Tak province, told a news conference.
The ethnic Kokang army said it clashed with Myanmar’s junta 126 times during November in northern Shan State.
The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) is fighting around Kokang, Mongkoe and Hsenwi to gain control to the west of Salween River with violence increasing last month after the arrival of junta reinforcements.