The Destruction in the 1970s
Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives during the 1970-75 civil war, when American saturation bombing targeting Vietnamese communist sanctuaries in Cambodia took their tool along with communist atrocities of Buddhist monks, laypeople, and temples. The Cambodian Buddhist Sangha was virtually annihilated by the communist Khmer Rouge regime in the years that followed through early 1979. Of some 65,000 monks and novices in the country in 1969-70, no more than 3,000 are believed by all available accounts to have survived the civil war and genocide during the decade that followed.
