(Based on the staff article from the KACHIN-NEWS-GROUP in October 2023.)
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| Bodies of Burmese burnt to crisp. |
The nearly 600-mile long train line runs through
most of the Sagaing Division, West of River Irrawaddy, to get to the Kachin
State at the northern end of Burma now known as Myanmar.
For more than 100 years the train had been running daily between Mandalay and Myitkyinar like a clock-work till 2021. The train was the only reliable connection between Myitkyina and the rest of Burma. Plane trips were too expensive and the Irrawaddy there was too shallow to navigate and there were no roads back then.
The Longest, Slowest Diesel Train in Burma
Daily diesel
train used to leave Myitkyina early morning and the sister train used to leave
Mandalay in the evening. They met somewhere in between and swapped the
escorting army units and continued the journeys. If nothing went wrong both
would reach their destinations roughly 24 hours later. The Kachin Independence
Army (KIA) was frequently attacking the trains, and so the long rail line and
the train itself had to be heavily guarded.
When I was a
boy-soldier in the army in early 1970s our platoon used to ride that train as
an escort unit. I reckoned that blue train might be the longest passenger train
in the whole wide world. It needed two diesel locomotives at the front and
another two at the rear end to pull and push all 60 or 70 odd carriages over
the mountainous terrain.
A flatbed-car
loaded with tons of heavy steel I-beams was attached to the first locomotive as
a heavy pilot car to detonate the possible KIA mines on the tracks and also to
withstand the explosion and prevent the derailment. The train moved so slow, at
some difficult uphill bends one can walk past it.
Except for the
upper-class sleeper cars, reserved strictly for the army officers and the party
and government officials, every single car was jam-packed with hundreds and
hundreds of passengers and their luggage. All doors were shut tight from inside
and the people had to get in and out through the windows when the train stopped
at the stations.
For last two years the train was dead because of the Burmese rebellion in the Sagaing Division. Burmese themselves has managed to stop the trains while KIA Kachins could not do that for last 60 years. Burmese from army’s heartland fucked Min Aung Hlaing’s Myanmar Army by denying the safe passage of Mandalay-Myitkyinar Train through their territories.
Local Burmese
PDF units have destroyed the railway bridges, dug up the tracks together with
the sleepers, and laid the home-made minefields along the railway tracks. Now
the desperate Myanmar Army is trying madly to repair and re-run the
Mandalay-Myitkyinar trains and their mad attempts are causing horrible damages
to the Burmese villages along the idle train line.
Railway Track re-Laid on Countless Bodies of Burmese
Power-mad
Dictator MAH has created many light infantry columns known among local Burmese as
the Demon War Columns (Bilu-Sitkyaung) to wipe out the recalcitrant rebelling peasants from the
Burmese villages along the trainline in the Sagaing Division.
The crazy
Myanmar soldiers high on army-supplied free Meth tablets (Yar Ba) of those
Demon War Coumns are now gang-raping the local Burmese girls and women incuding
the heavily-pregnants, torturing and slaughtering local Burmese men and boys,
and burning down whole villages along the train line.
Just to
terrorize them Burmese so that they would leave the Mandalay-Myitkyinar train alone
and let the Myanmar Army reopen the railway and re-supply their besieged
Northen Army Command up-north in the Kachin State.
Myanmar Army’s construction crew walking along the line and doing repairs same time was followed by a heavily-armed armoured train with attached carriages carrying necessary equipment and timber-sleepers and steel-rail-tracks. At least two infantry battalions are guarding the slowly-inching repair crew and train while the so-called demon columns of two light-infantry battalions are raiding the villages at left and right of the train track.
The whole
operation is manned by the infantrty battalions of Sagaing City-based LID-33
(33rd Light Infantry Division) namely LIB-364 and LIB-399 and the
column started out from the Ywa Htaung Train Station in Sagaing Township last
August.
Attrocities after Attrocities by the Demon War Columns
Started in late
July their plan was to repair the rail line first in the townships of Sagaing
and Wet Let within two months. To achieve that tight schedule following
atrocities were horribly committed by the demon war columns during August and
September in those two townships.
On August-26 one
of the demon columns raided the village of Kyee-gan-myauk in the western part
of Wet Let Township. They first captured the village leader and his young
daughter who is three months pregnant. They then gang-raped her right in front
of her father and then chopped off their heads. The evil sodiers even inserted
a soda can into the pregnant woman’s destroyed vagina.
On August-29 the
same column of soldiers captured five local people defence force members from
the village of Kyun-oo-daw in Wet Let Township and killed them all by chopping
their limbs and body parts while the men were still alive and breathing.
On September-1
five villagers from Sagaing Township’s Htan-daw-seik were killed by
decapitation and their bodies burnt to crisp. Also one young woman from Wetlet
Township’s Khet-kha village was gang raped and killed by the soldiers of one
Demon War Column next day.
On September-3
six villagers from Wetlet Township’s Pauk-kar Village and one villager from
nearby Htan-gyi Village were brutally murdered by same demon soldiers. So many
attrocities were committed by the soldiers within 20 days from August-15 to
September-3 and they left behind altogether 220 dead bodies of the victims.
Evil Light Infantry Battalions of Mynamar Army
Despite those
atrocious acts Myanmar Army sodiers so far managed to rebuild ony twenty miles
of rail ttack from Sagaing Township’s Ywar-htaung Station to Wetlet Township’s
Pauk-kan Station, for local PDF (People Defense Forces) have been fighting back
real hard. The heroic resistance of local people has forced Myanmar Army to
assign more light infantry battalions into the railway reconstruction task.
In addition to
the LIB-364 and LIB-399 under LID-33 based at Sagaing City, already guarding
the slow-marching construction train, LIB-12 and five more LIBs from
Lashio-based Northeastern Military Command are now also joining the Devil War
Columns to wipe out the local resistance.
Especially the
arrival of notorious LIB-708 based at Yangon Township’s Hmaw-bi was alarming
the local Burmese as that battalion was the first ever Devil War Column created
last year by the evil Myanmar Arm to frighten the Burmese populace.
LIB-708 The Most Brutal Devil War Column!
Notorious for
their brutal decapitation of any civilians they ran in the rural areas the
LIB-708 first earned its notority last year. On May-10, 2022 they chopped the
heads of thirty vilagers they captured from the Yey-oo Township’s Mone-dai-bin
Village.
They already did
same thing recently to 17 villagers captured from the Sagiang Township’s
Tar-dine Village. The relentless
gang-rapes and countless mass-murders have forced 778,900 people of Sagain
Division to become IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons). According to the UNOCHA
(United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) that
number was a significant percentage of more than two million total IDPs in
war-torn Myanmar.
