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An airstrike by Myanmar’s army on a village under the control of an armed ethnic minority group killed about 40 people and injured at least 20 others, officials of the group and a local charity said Thursday. They said hundreds of houses burned in a fire triggered by the bombing.
The attack occurred Wednesday in Kyauk Ni Maw village on Ramree island, an area controlled by the ethnic Arakan Army in western Rakhine state, they said. The military has not announced any attack in the area.
The situation in the village could not be independently confirmed, with access to the internet and cellphone service in the area mostly cut off.
Myanmar is wracked by violence that began when the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021. After the army used lethal force to suppress peaceful demonstrations, many opponents of military rule took up arms and large parts of the country are now embroiled in conflict.
Khaing Thukha, a spokesperson for the Arakan Army, told The Associated Press that a jet fighter bombed the village on Wednesday afternoon, killing 40 civilians and injuring more than 20 others.
“All the dead were civilians. Among the dead and injured are women and children,” Khaing Thukha said. A fire started by the airstrike spread through the village, destroying more than 500 houses, Khaing Thukha added.
It was unclear why the village was targeted. The leader of a local charity group and independent media also reported the airstrike and casualties.
The military government has stepped up airstrikes over the past three years on armed pro-democracy groups collectively known as the People’s Defense Force and on armed ethnic minority groups that have been fighting for decades for greater autonomy. The two groups sometimes carry out joint operations against the army.
Ramree – 340 kilometers (210 miles) northwest of Yangon, the country’s largest city – was captured by the Arakan Army in March last year.
The Arakan Army is the well-trained and well-armed military wing of the Rakhine ethnic minority movement which seeks autonomy from Myanmar’s central government. It is also a member of an alliance of armed ethnic groups that recently gained strategic territory in the country’s northeast on the border with China.
It began its offensive in Rakhine in November 2023 and has now gained control of a strategically important regional army headquarters and 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships, leaving only the state’s capital, Sittwe, and two important townships near Ramree still in military government hands.
A leader of the charity group, which has been assisting residents of the village, told AP on Thursday that at least 41 people were killed and 50 others were injured in the airstrike, which targeted the village’s market.
The leader, who was away from the town at the time of the airstrike, spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. He said he received the information from members of his group who were in the village and were facing a shortage of medicine to treat the injured people.
Rakhine-based news outlets including Arakan Princess Media also reported the attack and posted photos online showing people putting out fires at their homes.
Rakhine, formerly known as Arakan, was the site of a brutal army counterinsurgency operation in 2017 that drove about 740,000 minority Rohingya Muslims to seek safety across the border in Bangladesh.
D-Wave Quantum CEO Alan Baratz said Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is “dead wrong” about quantum computing after comments from the head of the chip giant spooked Wall Street on Wednesday.
Huang was asked on Tuesday about Nvidia’s strategy for quantum computing. He said Nvidia could make conventional chips that are needed alongside quantum computing chips, but that those computers would need 1 million times the number of quantum processing units, called qubits, than they currently have.
Getting “very useful quantum computers” to market could take 15 to 30 years, Huang told analysts.
Huang’s remarks sent stocks in the nascent industry slumping, with D-Wave plunging 36% on Wednesday.
“The reason he’s wrong is that we at D-Wave are commercial today,” Baratz told CNBC’s Deidre Bosa on “The Exchange.” Baratz said companies including Mastercard and Japan’s NTT Docomo “are using our quantum computers today in production to benefit their business operations.”
“Not 30 years from now, not 20 years from now, not 15 years from now,” Baratz said. “But right now today.”
D-Wave’s revenue is still minimal. Sales in the latest quarter fell 27% to $1.9 million from $2.6 million a year earlier.
Quantum computing promises to solve problems that are difficult for current processors, such as decoding encryption, generating random numbers and large-scale simulations. Technologists have been working on it for decades, and companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM are pursuing it today, alongside researchers at startups and universities.
D-Wave was among a number of companies that enjoyed a revival of interest from investors in December, when Google announced a breakthrough in its own research. Google said that it had completed a 100 qubit chip, the second of six steps in its strategy to build a quantum system with 1 million qubits.
D-Wave shares soared 178% in December after popping 185% the month prior. Quantum company Rigetti Computing, which plummeted 45% on Wednesday, quintupled in value last month. IonQ dropped 39% on Wednesday. The stock rose 14% in December following a 143% rally in November.
Baratz acknowledged that one approach to quantum computing, called gate-based, may be decades away. But he said D-Wave uses an annealing approach, which can be deployed now.
While Huang’s “comments may not be totally off-base for gate model quantum computers, well, they are 100% off base for annealing quantum computers,” Baratz said.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Even after Wednesday’s slide, D-Wave shares are up about 600% in the last year, giving the company a market cap of $1.6 billion.
Quantum computing has also been boosted by investor interest in artificial intelligence, the technology that’s led to surging demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units, which use conventional transistors instead of Qubits. Nvidia’s market cap has increased by 168% in the past year to $3.4 trillion.
Baratz said D-Wave systems can solve problems beyond the capabilities of the fastest Nvidia-equipped systems.
“l’ll be happy to meet with Jensen any time, any place, to help fill in these gaps for him,” Baratz said.