500-pound bombs on sleeping students: Myanmar junta strike on school kills 19

Internet and phone services around Kyauktaw remain patchy, complicating efforts to confirm the full scale of casualties.

At least 19 students, most of them teenagers, were killed in western Myanmar after a junta airstrike struck two private high schools in Rakhine’s Kyauktaw township, according to the ethnic armed group Arakan Army (AA).

The strike, carried out just after midnight on Friday, also wounded 22 others, the AA said in a statement on Telegram. Victims ranged in age from 15 to 21, AFP reported.

Local media outlet Myanmar Now, as cited by AFP, reported that a military warplane dropped two 500-pound bombs on a school compound where students were sleeping.

UNICEF condemned the strike, calling it a “brutal attack” that “adds to a pattern of increasingly devastating violence in Rakhine State, with children and families paying the ultimate price.”

Context

The Arakan Army is locked in a fierce fight with Myanmar’s military for control of Rakhine, where the group has seized significant territory over the past year.

Myanmar has been in turmoil since the 2021 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, triggering an armed resistance that has spread across multiple regions.

Rights groups and international observers have repeatedly accused the junta of targeting civilian areas with air and artillery strikes in an attempt to crush opposition.

Internet and phone services around Kyauktaw remain patchy, complicating efforts to confirm the full scale of casualties.