PARIS, January 10. /TASS/. As many as 40 people have been killed and 50 others injured in Myanmar’s airstrike on the town of Arakan (Rakhine state), captured by militants of the Arakan Army (AA), the AFP news agency reported on Friday.

The bombing caused a large fire in urban neighborhoods, which destroyed more than 500 residential houses, the agency said. A powerful airstrike also targeted the settlement of Kyauk Ni Maw on the AA-controlled Ramree Island, where Myanmar authorities had earlier planned to build a strategically important deep-sea port with the help of China.

An offensive against government forces has been ongoing in the region since June 2024. The Arakan Army, the military wing of the Buddhist-majority population of Rakhine, captured the border town of Maungdaw. Today, the northern part of the Rakhine state, as well as Myanmar's 271-kilometer-long border with Bangladesh, are fully under control of the AA ethnic rebel group.

Both the hostilities in the Rakhine state and the AA offensive have raised concerns in Bangladesh, as the ongoing fighting could escalate violence and pose a significant threat to the Rohingya Muslim minority, 74,000 of whose members fled to Bangladesh as illegal migrants in 2017.

The Arakan Army is fighting government forces in alliance with the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and Ta’ang National Liberation Army, which now control large areas of Myanmar along the border with China.

According to the United Nations, Myanmar's war in 2024 increased the number of refugees to 3.5 million, which is 1.5 million more than in 2023.

Myanmar's civil war escalated after the military ousted the civilian government on February 1, 2021. They claimed the November 2020 parliamentary elections were rigged in favor of the National League for Democracy party. Over 6,000 people have been killed in clashes in Myanmar over the last two years, human rights activists reported.