Myanmar military airstrike kills at least 53 - witnesses

At least 53 people have been killed, according to survivors, in one of the deadliest airstrikes by the Myanmar military in the ongoing civil war.

They say that the dead include at least 15 women and a number of children. The BBC cannot verify the numbers.

The attack targeted a village in Sagaing region, which has opposed the military government.

The military has increasingly used air strikes against their opponents since they seized power in February 2021.

Communities in Sagaing have put up some of the strongest opposition to military rule in Myanmar, forming their own militias and running their own schools and clinics.

One villager told the BBC that a military jet had flown over at around 7:00am and dropped a bomb, followed by a helicopter gunship which strafed the village for twenty minutes.

Residents uploaded video showing scenes of appalling carnage, with dismembered bodies lying on the ground and several buildings on fire. "Please call out if you are still alive, we are coming to help you," they can he heard shouting as they walked through Pa Zi Gyi looking for victims of the attack. They said that they tried to count the bodies, but that this was difficult because so many were in pieces, scattered among shredded clothing and burned motorbikes.

Pa Zi Gyi had been packed with people from nearby communities attending a ceremony to mark the opening of a new People's Defence Forces (PDF) office.

The PDFs are volunteer anti-coup militias waging an armed campaign against the military in various parts of Myanmar.

Thousands have been killed in the civil war, with an additional 1.4 million displaced. Nearly a third of the country's population is also in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.

The military government has been increasingly relying on its Russian and Chinese aircraft to bomb opposition-controlled villages, because its ground troops are finding it difficult to move around on roads where they are often ambushed or hit by mines and IEDs. The airstrikes can inflict much higher casualties among non-combatants.

Thousands have been killed in the civil war, with an additional 1.4 million displaced. Nearly a third of the country's population is also in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.

There were at least 600 air attacks by the military between February 2021 and January 2023, according to a BBC analysis of data from the conflict-monitoring group Acled (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project).

The exiled National Unity Government, which was formed after the coup, says that these attacks killed 155 civilians between October 2021 and September 2022.

In October, at least 50 people were killed after air force jets dropped three bombs on a concert organised by an ethnic insurgent group in Kachin state. In the previous month, an airstrike on a school in the village of Let Yet Kone in central Myanmar killed at least five children and injured several others.

If the death toll at Pa Zi Gyi is confirmed, it will be one of the deadliest single incidents so far in the civil war.