In Ywangan Township of southern Shan State, junta troops extrajudicially detained and abducted four civilians without providing any reason.
On November 15, regime soldiers raided Kyaukhnget Village in Ywangan Township. They conducted door-to-door searches, inspected nearby forests for possible resistance fighters, and then arbitrarily detained four civilians.
“There were quite a lot of troops in the junta column. They mainly targeted villages near the forests, checking everywhere. They were hunting for resistance forces. On days when we heard the column was operating nearby, we didn’t even dare to go to our plantations. And now, they’ve arrested four of our villagers for no reason,” said a 40-year-old Kyaukhnget villager.
The abducted men are in their 40s, and three days later, there is still no news about their whereabouts, he added.
In Ywangan, there have been previous incidents in which junta troops conducted patrol operations and took away local residents without any clear reason.
Between mid-October and the first week of November, seven civilians from Ywangan Township were abducted by the junta and had not been released as of November 17.
Additionally, in the Kyaukmyaung, Theinkone, Tapinpyaw, Kyaukkupyin, and Linway village tracts of Ywangan Township, junta-appointed authorities are collecting between 5,000 and 10,000 MMK from each household under the pretext of funding for conscription batch 19.
“They said households with young men of conscription age have to pay 10,000 MMK, and those without have to pay 5,000 MMK. It’s not the soldiers who collect the money. It's the ward administrators who come around to take it,” said a woman from Tapinpyaw Village Tract.
She also accused some ward administrators of misusing the funds by collecting more than the rate set by the junta.
Currently, junta troops are stationed in the Kyaukhnget, Yane, and Kyaukpizat village tracts of Ywangan Township, closely monitoring the movement of people in and out of the villages.
On October 28, a junta-appointed administrator and a civilian were killed in the Kyaukpizat Village Tract, prompting the junta to tighten security in the surrounding areas.
