Myanmar military, insurgents battle over port town

Yangon, Nov 17 (Agencies): Myanmar's military has launched attacks from the air and the sea to recapture a port town on the Bay of Bengal, an opposition alliance said on Friday, as junta forces face the fiercest offensive from their enemies in years.
The military, which seized power from an elected government in a 2021 coup, is battling a coordinated offensive launched last month by an alliance of three ethnic minority insurgent groups, as well as allied pro-democracy fighters who have taken up arms since the coup.
"The military attacked Pauktaw town with helicopters and artillery fire from a navy ship after we conquered the police station of the town in the morning," the Three Brotherhood Alliance said on its Telegram channel, referring to the fighting in western Myanmar's Rakhine State on Thursday.
"In the evening, junta troops came into the town and shot and killed civilians," the alliance said.
Reuters could not independently verify the report and a junta spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.
Pauktaw is about 500 km (310 miles ) northwest of Myanmar's main city of Yangon.
The offensive, which the insurgent alliance calls "Operation 1027" after the date it was launched, is the biggest the junta has faced in years.
Three rebel groups, aligned with pro-democracy fighters and a parallel, pro-democracy civilian government, have captured several towns and military posts across the country.
The Irrawaddy news portal, citing a resident of Pauktaw, said members of the Arakan Army (AA) guerrilla group had earlier taken control of the town.
"All the residents are running away. There is no one in the city, all the shops are closed," the resident said.
Fighting has also broken out in Shan State on the border with China where the insurgents have pledged to wrest control of the area from the junta and eradicate online scam centres run illegally there.
In the weeks before the clashes, Chinese officials called on the junta to take stronger action against the scam centres where Chinese and other foreign nationals have been known to be trapped as victims of human trafficking.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been trafficked to work in scam centres across Southeast Asia in recent years, including at least 120,000 in Myanmar, robbing strangers of their savings online in a fast-growing new kind of crime, the United Nations says.
Earlier, eleven people, including eight children, have been killed in Myanmar's Chin State after a military jet bombed a school, villagers say.
Locals say the strike on the remote village of Vuilu in the mountainous region happened on Wednesday.
Myanmar is currently in the grip of a civil war with numerous armed groups fighting the military junta which deposed an elected government in 2021.
Chin State is a stronghold of resistance against the junta.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres this week expressed his deep concern over the escalating conflict in the country - where two million people have now been displaced by fighting.
Meanwhile, about 250 desperate Rohingya refugees are afloat in the Andaman Sea after their attempt to land in Indonesia was rejected.
Their decrepit, overcrowded wooden boat reached western Indonesia on Thursday. However, after two other boats carrying about 350 refugees had docked in the northern region of Aceh earlier in the week, they were prevented from landing.
The third boat was met with resistance from locals in Bireuen, who refused to allow it to land and pushed the vessel back out to sea.
When the boat tried to land a second time - a little farther south at Muara Batu - and refugees staggered onto the beach, they were lined up and escorted back, witnesses said.
The mostly Muslim Rohingya are persecuted in Myanmar, and thousands risk their lives each year on long and expensive sea journeys, often in flimsy boats, to try to reach Malaysia or Indonesia.
Fishermen at the beach in Muara Batu handed some of the refugees packets of food and bottles of water, but the situation escalated late into the evening.