How Myanmar’s schools are falling victim to the country’s civil war
An open source investigation from British NGO Myanmar Witness has documented 174 incidents when schools and universities in Myanmar have been damaged and destroyed by airstrikes, heavy weaponry, ground offensives and fire since the country’s civil war began with a military coup that took place on February 1, 2021.
Burned, bombed and destroyed – schools have been some of the civilian buildings most affected by the fighting between the Myanmar Army and pro-democracy rebel groups. For more than three years, Myanmar has been in the grips of a civil war sparked by the military coup d’état on February 1, 2021, which overturned the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.
On July 20, 2024, the NGO Myanmar Witness published a report documenting 174 incidents where more than 133 schools and universities had been damaged or destroyed since the start of the conflict. Some schools suffered repeat attacks. Myanmar Witness is a British project run through the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR). As part of this project, researchers and investigators from both Myanmar and around the world document human rights abuses in Myanmar, often using images posted on social media as well as tools for analysis and verification available online.
The NGO documented 64 deaths related to these incidents – in some cases, the deaths were of small children. However, this number is likely higher; the human toll is harder to verify than material damage.
