The Holiday

Twenty-six airstrikes across seven regions during four days of Thingyan. Twenty-three dead including children and novice monks. In the villages struck, there had been no fighting on the ground.

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Buddhist monasteries fill during Thingyan. Families bring offerings. Novice monks receive alms. Displaced communities shelter in whatever compounds remain standing. The attendance is predictable, annual, and --- in a military planning framework --- indexable.

On April 13, the eve of Myanmar’s four-day water festival, the military bombed a monastery in Seik Hkun village, west of Shwebo Township in Sagaing Region. Two novice monks were killed. Eight others were injured. In Kani Township, bombs fell on the Thamin Chan village monastery --- two novices and two villagers killed. Across Sagaing, Magwe, Mandalay, and Bago Regions, and Rakhine, Chin, and Karen States --- twenty townships in seven of the country’s fifteen regions --- the military carried out at least twenty-six airstrikes on civilian targets over the four days of Thingyan. Twenty-three people were killed. Approximately fifty were wounded. At least six monasteries were hit.

In the villages targeted by these airstrikes, there had been no active fighting, nor were there any PDF armed groups present.

At Kanni village, fourteen miles west of Kawkareik Town in Karen State, the military dropped two bombs near a monastery. Six people were killed --- four children and two adults. Seventeen others were wounded, ten of them monks and novices. Among the dead: a two-year-old, a three-year-old, and a fifteen-year-old girl.

The monastery at Kanni village was bombed during Thingyan the previous year. In April 2025, junta airstrikes on the same site killed six civilians and wounded at least twenty-five, including ten monks. Same village. Same monastery. Same holiday. Consecutive years.

Between January 2024 and December 2025, the Centre for Information Resilience documented 312 airstrikes on protected religious sites across Myanmar. Two hundred and sixty-one struck monasteries --- eighty-four percent of the total. Seventy-seven resulted in complete destruction. The Myanmar Air Force was cited in 277 of the incidents. The attacks spanned thirteen of fifteen states and regions, affecting a third of the country’s townships.

Thingyan concentrates the pattern. In 2025, eleven people were killed and fifty-one injured in junta airstrikes on monasteries over the festival. In 2026, twenty-three killed, approximately fifty wounded. The numbers rise. The method does not change. Known gathering points. Known dates. Aircraft overhead.

This is not collateral damage from counterinsurgency operations encountering unexpected civilian presence. Monasteries are the most predictable congregation sites in the Buddhist calendar. They fill on specific, publicly observed dates. The military selects the coordinates and releases the ordnance. When a monastery is struck during Thingyan --- the single most attended religious observance in Myanmar --- the targeting did not fail to account for civilian presence. It accounted for it precisely.

On April 12, one day before the first airstrikes, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a press statement for Thingyan:

The people of Burma have repeatedly demonstrated courage and resilience in the face of ongoing suffering. As the spirit of Thingyan reminds us of a better tomorrow, we wish the people of Burma strength, resilience, and renewed hope for the year.

No statement from the State Department addressing the twenty-three dead, the six monasteries, or the targeting of civilian gatherings during the holiday it had just commemorated has followed as of April 20. The response that exists is the pre-holiday greeting. What came after the bombs is silence.

The junta did not violate a ceasefire. There is no ceasefire in Myanmar. It did not break with a norm of holiday restraint --- the military has no documented practice of pausing operations for religious observances. The holiday is not what was violated. The holiday is what was used. The festival that fills the monasteries is, from the perspective of the institution selecting targets, the mechanism that fills them.

At a monastery in Kanni village, where the same thing happened last year, a two-year-old and a three-year-old were among the dead. The Secretary of State had wished their country renewed hope. The greeting was issued on April 12. The bombs fell on April 13.

Sources

- Solen