About 200 Myanmar military personnel withdrew on Thursday to a border town linking Myawaddy and Myanmar after days of attacks by anti-junta rebels in the area, according to ethnic armed group spokesman and local media reports. Bridges in Thailand.

Myanmar’s military junta is fighting armed rebel groups on multiple fronts and has suffered a series of defeats in border areas.

The retreat of junta troops in Myawaddy, adjacent to Thailand’s Mae Sot, marks the possible loss of another important border trade outpost with direct highway access to parts of central Myanmar.

Saw Taw Nee, spokesman for the Karen National Union (KNU), the anti-junta group that led the attack on Myawaddy, said about 200 fleeing soldiers gathered at the border crossing into Thailand on Thursday.

Local news outlet Khit Thit reported that Thai authorities were negotiating with the soldiers to decide whether to grant them asylum.

A spokesman for Myanmar’s military junta did not respond to a request for comment.

The Karen National Union said last week that its forces attacked a junta camp near Myawaddy, forcing about 600 security personnel and their families to surrender.

Police Colonel Borwornphop Soontornlekha, the immigration director of Thailand’s Tak province where Mae Sot is located, said crossings in the area have been opened to large numbers of civilians entering Thailand from Myanmar.

“Usually about 2,000 people enter Mae Sot from Myawaddy every day, but in the last three days the number has been close to 4,000 people a day,” Borwornphop told Reuters.

The Thai military has stepped up security on its side of the border, deploying military vehicles equipped with roof-mounted machine guns.

The latest round of fighting between rebels and the military has displaced at least 2,000 people across Myanmar, according to the Karen Peace Support Network, a civil society organization.

Myanmar’s military took power in a 2021 coup after deposing the elected civilian government, but a loose alliance of ethnic rebel groups and a militia movement have suffered a series of setbacks.