In a rare feat, soldiers in the Myanmar military have admitted to killing, torturing and raping civilians.
In exclusive interviews with the BBC, they for the first time have given detailed accounts of widespread human rights abuses they say they were ordered to conduct.
"They ordered me to torture, loot and kill innocent people."
The report was published on Friday when AFP claimed that Myanmar junta troops killed at least 10 people and torched hundreds of houses during a raid on a village as fighting rages in a hotspot of opposition to last year’s coup.
The Southeast Asian nation has been in turmoil since the putsch, with almost 700,000 people displaced by violence according to the UN and the economy in tatters.
Over 2,100 people have been killed in the junta's crackdown on dissent, according to a local monitoring group.
Maung Oo, one of the soldiers, says he thought he had been recruited to the military as a guard.
But he was part of a battalion that killed civilians hiding in a monastery in May 2022, reports BBC.
"We were ordered to round up all the men and shoot them dead," he says. "The saddest thing was we had to kill elderly people and a woman."
The testimony of six soldiers, including a corporal, plus some of their victims provides a rare insight of a military desperate to cling to power. All of the Myanmar names in this report have been changed to protect their identities.
The soldiers, who recently defected, are under the protection of a local unit of the People's Defence Force (PDF), a loose network of civilian militia groups fighting to restore democracy.
On 20 December last year, three helicopters circled Yae Myet village in central Myanmar, dropping soldiers with orders to open fire.
At least five different people, speaking independently from each other, told the BBC what happened.
They say the army entered in three separate groups, shooting at men, women and children indiscriminately.
"The order was to shoot anything you see," says Corporal Aung from an undisclosed location in a remote part of Myanmar's jungle.
He says some people hid in what they thought was a safe place, but as the soldiers closed in they "started to run and we shot at them".
Cpl Aung admits his unit shot and buried five men.
"We also had an order to set fire to every large and decent house in the village," he says.
The soldiers paraded around the village torching houses, shouting, "Burn! burn!"
Cpl Aung set fire to four buildings. Those interviewed say about 60 houses were burnt, leaving much of the village in ashes.
Most of the villagers had fled, but not everyone. One home in the centre of the village was inhabited.
Thiha says he joined the military for the money but was shocked by what he was forced to do and the atrocities he witnessed.
He speaks about a group of young women they arrested in Yae Myet.
The officer handed them to his subordinates and said, "Do as you wish," he recounts. He said they raped the girls but he was not involved. We tracked down two of these girls.
The BBC put the allegations in this investigation to General Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for Myanmar's military. In a statement, he denied that the army has been targeting civilians. He said both of the raids cited here were legitimate targets and those killed were "terrorists".
He denied the army has been burning villages and says that it is the PDFs who are carrying out arson attacks.
