Myanmar Military Airstrike Hits Buddhist Monastery, Killing 14 During Meditation Retreat
A fighter jet bombed a Buddhist monastery in central Myanmar on Friday, killing 14 people who had gathered for a meditation retreat to mark the start of Buddhist Lent, according to AFP reporting via BBC News.
The strike occurred at approximately 09:00 local time (02:30 GMT) in Myaung township, in the Sagaing region roughly 70 kilometers west of Mandalay. A fighter jet dropped a bomb inside the monastery compound, according to local official Nway Oo, as reported by AP and Asharq Al-Awsat.
All 14 of those killed were elderly, according to a rescue worker cited by the BBC. Nway Oo Myaung, identified as a pro-democracy rebel, told AFP that the victims comprised 11 men and three women, aged between 50 and 70. Five of the dead were from one village; the remaining nine came from a neighbouring township. Twenty other people were wounded, including a number of monks.
A second, unnamed opposition fighter described the aircraft returning to bomb a second time while he and others were attempting to rescue those caught in the initial strike. Myanmar's military has not commented on the incident.
Sagaing has been one of the most active front lines in Myanmar's civil war. That conflict began after the military staged a coup in February 2021, removing the civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The country has been under military rule since. The region's dense network of pro-democracy resistance groups, aligned under the broader anti-junta insurgency, has drawn sustained air operations from the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar's armed forces are known.
The targeting of a religious site during a meditation retreat, an observance tied to the Buddhist Lent period known as Vassa, fits a documented pattern of aerial attacks on civilian and religious infrastructure in conflict zones across Sagaing and adjoining regions. The use of fixed-wing aircraft against ground targets in areas with no opposing air force reflects the military's reliance on air superiority, meaning it can bomb from the sky with no threat of being challenged in the air, as a force multiplier amid territorial losses to resistance forces across multiple fronts.
The broader context here is the increasing regularity with which Myanmar's military has used airstrikes against civilian-adjacent targets, including monasteries, schools, and displacement camps, since the civil war's escalation in late 2022. International condemnation, including from United Nations human rights mechanisms, has not translated into any enforceable constraint on the Tatmadaw's air operations. The junta's access to aviation fuel and maintenance supply chains, while under scrutiny, has not been effectively cut off by any multilateral sanctions regime.
For observers tracking the conflict's trajectory, the Myaung township strike reinforces a structural feature of this war: the asymmetry between a military that retains overwhelming air power and a resistance movement that operates largely without anti-aircraft capability. That imbalance has shaped the conflict's humanitarian toll, as resistance-held or contested areas remain vulnerable to aerial bombardment with minimal defensive options. The reported second pass by the aircraft during rescue operations is consistent with tactics documented in prior strikes in Sagaing, where returning aircraft have targeted responders and survivors.
