FILE – Smoke rises from rubble and corrugated iron roofs of a school building burned to the ground in Taung Myint village in Myanmar’s Magway region, Sunday, Oct. 16, 2022. An intensification of fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has led to a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors armed conflict in the Southeast Asian country said in a report dated Saturday, July 20, 2024. (AP Photo, File)

BANGKOK (AP) — Intensifying fighting in Myanmar’s civil war has led to a sharp increase in destructive attacks on schools, a group that monitors the armed conflict in the Southeast Asian country said in a report Saturday.

According to Myanmar Witness, the attacks have further strained Myanmar’s already divided school system, with millions of children being deprived of education and forced to flee their homes, denied vaccinations and suffering from poor nutrition.

The group, a project of the UK-based Centre for Information Resilience, identified a total of 174 attacks on schools and universities in Myanmar since the military seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi three years ago. The group said the tally came from evidence in social media and news reports.

Other groups have suggested higher numbers of attacks. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, a New York-based advocacy group, counted more than 245 reports of attacks on schools and 190 reports of military use of educational facilities in 2022-23.

The military takeover in 2021 was met with widespread nonviolent pro-democracy demonstrations, but these were met with deadly violence. Many opponents of military rule then took up arms, and large parts of the country are now embroiled in conflict. It is estimated that the military government controls less than half of the country.

“Education was the bedrock of Myanmar’s democracy movement, but today Myanmar’s young people see their schools — and life chances — in ruins,” said Matt Lawrence, Project Director at Myanmar Witness. “Unless education is protected across Myanmar, the next generation risks seeing their worldviews driven by factionalism and war, rather than hope and reason.”

According to humanitarian organization Save the Children, the number of pupils in Myanmar fell by 80% from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to 2022, a year after the military took over. By mid-2022, about half of the country’s children, or 7.8 million, were out of school, the organization said.

According to Myanmar Witness, there are documented reports of 64 deaths and 106 injuries in the 176 attacks on schools, but most of these could not be verified.

Myanmar’s shadow government, which is leading the pro-democracy struggle against military rule, estimated in January that more than 570 children under the age of 18 had been killed by security forces in various circumstances. More than 8,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, according to the multinational Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.

Myanmar Witness placed most of the responsibility for the destruction of schools on airstrikes by the Myanmar military. Airstrikes have become more frequent as pro-democracy forces and ethnic minority groups allied with them have made gains on the battlefield.

The military “has increasingly had to resort to air strikes, often with less and less capable aircraft, because they no longer have effective access to the ground as a result of the resistance offensives,” Lawrence told The Associated Press.

The military government has consistently denied targeting civilians or using excessive force.

The report states that resistance groups have also attacked schools, but much less frequently and less destructively, often using drones carrying small explosive charges.

Education is also being disrupted by other factors. Many young people, including older students, have played a greater role in the resistance. Thousands of teachers left their jobs after the military seized power and joined a civil disobedience movement aimed at undermining military control of government institutions. And the shifting front lines of the conflict make it difficult for teachers to teach on a reliable basis.

Some teachers have founded or joined schools outside the military’s reach.

“What we see is almost a dual system developing in Myanmar, where there are government schools and schools that are sponsored by other parties, and there are retaliatory measures for participating in either system,” said Lisa Chung Bender, executive director of the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.

“It puts children and teachers in an impossible position, where they have to go through checkpoints and declare where they are going, and if it turns out they are going to an enemy school, whichever enemy that is, they can be harassed, detained or physically punished,” she said.

The lack of proper access to education is just one part of a deepening humanitarian crisis in Myanmar. More than 3 million people have been forced from their homes by fighting, most since the military took power in 2021, and the country is suffering from a deepening economic crisis.

A June report from the United Nations Children’s Fund on global child food poverty found that 35% of children in Myanmar live in food poverty, defined as having access to half or less of the eight food groups that children need each day for healthy growth and development.

According to the UN Development Programme, more than half of children in Myanmar live in poverty as the country’s emerging middle class has disappeared.