“The school was bombed. Burning means killing students and teachers for learning something they do not want taught. The bombing of a school in Afghanistan has become synonymous with the actions of Taliban insurgents,” Ye Htut wrote. He went on to claim that although the Tatmadaw had fought many campaigns against ethnic insurgency groups, ethnic armed organizations had never targeted schools. “The Taliban are not working for democracy. Following the Taliban is not democratic,” he concluded. School attacks denied A member of the Anti-Fascist Armed Forces in Yangon denied that pro-democracy groups are targeting schools, saying “attacks on children will not at all be tolerated”. He further asserted that if the resistance endangered civilians, it would lose the support of the people, which is necessary for the revolution’s success. “It is important that we stay close to these people … the people’s militia is fighting from the people’s chest,” he said. Still, the comparison of resistance fighters to ISIS and the Taliban has proliferated across social media, mostly within pro-military Facebook groups, and gradually dovetailed with more general anti-Muslim sentiment, which has also been on the rise. This narrative has even received the junta’s seal of approval, making its way into state media and government meetings. Military-controlled Myawady TV aired an interview on May 22 with a monk who claimed National League for Democracy supporters burned down a village in Magway Region, contrary to witness accounts that blamed the Tatmadaw. “Only Taliban and NLD supporters’ groups are setting fire to schools in the world,” the monk said. Screenshot of a May 22, 2021 Myawaddy TV broadcast featuring a monk comparing the NLD to the Taliban. On May 24, a user in a Meiktila News group with over 70,000 followers posted that a police station at Moebye in southern Shan State’s Pekon Township was captured by “the Taliban group”, in a Facebook post that has since been removed. He claimed that the military then retaliated, leaving “more than 150 Taliban corpses” and taking 100 prisoners. The post showed images of tanks and military helicopters, some of which were lifted from elsewhere on the internet. The picture of helicopters was taken from an article about test-flying model aircraft in Texas. On May 17 – a day after Ye Htut’s post – another Facebook user accused “Taliban GZ” of bombing schools and education offices (“GZ” is a reference to Generation Z, which has been at the forefront of resistance). On May 22, about a week after Ye Htut’s post, a Facebook user posted in a pro-military group with over 20,000 members that the “most widely used term” both online and offline to refer to the pro-democracy movement is the “Burmese Taliban. Like the post five days earlier, the author also referred to them as “Taliban GZ”.