Brigadier General Phyo Thant (Burmese: ဖြိုးသန့်) is a Burmese military officer and incumbent deputy minister for border affairs of Myanmar. He previously served as the commander of the Northwestern Regional Command.[2][3]

Phyo Thant
ဖြိုးသန့်
Deputy Minister for Border Affairs
Assumed office
6 January 2022
Preceded byKhun Thant Zaw Htoo[1]
Commander of Northwestern Regional Command
In office
February 2021 – 6 January 2022
LeaderMin Aung Hlaing
Succeeded byThan Htike
Personal details
NationalityBurmese
Alma materOfficers Training School
Military service
Allegiance Myanmar
Branch/serviceMyanmar Army
RankBrigadier General

Career edit

Phyo Thant graduated from the 23rd intake of the Officers Training School. He served as the division commander of Military Operation Command No. 4 under Yangon Regional Command until he was promoted to Northwestern Regional Command after the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état.[2] It is rumored that soon after his appointment, the military regime detained and interrogated him for his plan to defect and take refuge in an ethnically controlled area. He is said to be became the highest-ranking regime official so far to switch allegiance to the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) against the junta and the high-ranking officer to be arrested.[4][5] The local media reported that he died during the interrogation.[6] According to a recent source, he vehemently denied the rumors and asserted that they were baseless. His arrest was reportedly attributed to his alleged poor performance in the wake of substantial losses against resistance fighters in the Chin State and Sagaing Region.[7]

In January 2022, he was removed from his position as commander following the loss of hundreds of soldiers under his command to opposition fighters. Subsequently, Lieutenant General Than Htike assumed the interim command. He was subsequently appointed as the deputy minister for border affairs.[2][8]

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ "ပြည်ထောင်စုသမ္မတမြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော် နိုင်ငံတော်စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီ အမိန့်အမှတ် ၁၇၅ / ၂၀၂၁ ၁၃၈၃ ခုနှစ်၊ ဝါခေါင်လပြည့်ကျော် ၃ ရက် (၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်၊ ဩဂုတ်လ ၂၅ ရက်) ဒုတိယဝန်ကြီး ခန့်အပ်တာဝန်ပေးခြင်း".
  2. ^ a b c "Junta appoints new head of northwestern command". Myanmar NOW. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  3. ^ "အနောက်မြောက်တိုင်းစစ်ဌာနချုပ်တိုင်းမှူး ဗိုလ်မှူးချုပ် ဖြိုးသန့်ကို နယ်စပ်ရေးရာဒုဝန်ကြီးအဖြစ် ပြောင်းလဲတာဝန်ပေး". Myanma Platform (in Burmese). Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  4. ^ Irrawaddy, The (2021-10-07). "နမခ တိုင်းမှူး ဗိုလ်မှူးချုပ် ဖြိုးသန့် တပ်ကို စွန့်ခွာရန် ပြင်သဖြင့် ထိန်းသိမ်းခံရဟုဆို". The Irrawaddy. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  5. ^ Chanayuth (2021-10-07). "Myanmar Military Detains North Western Commander for Planning to Defect: Ethnic Insurgent Sources". The Irrawaddy. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  6. ^ "နမခတိုင်းမှူး စစ်ကြောရေးတွင် လက်လွန်သေဆုံးဟု သတင်းထွက်ပေါ်". DVB (in Burmese). 2021-10-06. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  7. ^ "စစ်ကောင်စီက စစ်ဆင်ရေးတွေ ပိုလုပ်လာတဲ့ စစ်ကိုင်းတိုင်း". BBC News မြန်မာ (in Burmese). Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  8. ^ "တပ်ထိပ်ပိုင်း အပြောင်းအရွှေ့တွေ ဘယ်လိုဖြစ်လာဖို့ရှိလဲ". BBC News မြန်မာ (in Burmese). Retrieved 2023-02-19.