The Myanmar Civil War: The War of a Hundred Armies

The sovereign nation of Myanmar has never truly known peace, but the war that has gripped this country since 2021 is on a whole other level. Fought between a ruthless military regime on one side, and not just one, not a handful, but a hundred different armies of freedom fighters or even more on the other, the Myanmar Civil War is a conflict unlike any other in the modern world. Often ignored by the global public, little-known and even less well-understood by most people who have heard about it, the war rarely reaches the front page of Western news diets.

Yet both for the immensely high stakes of the fighting itself, and for its repercussions around the world, it ranks among the very most important conflicts of our time. Myanmar’s rebels are on the rise, the ruling regime knows its days are numbered, and both sides are barreling toward a violent conclusion.

This is a deep dive into the Myanmar Civil War: why it began, who its many belligerents are, what is happening now, and where this critical conflict will ultimately lead a divided, and fracturing, nation. To understand it, one must first abandon the comfortable categories of conventional war, because Myanmar’s war is a hundred wars at once, bound together by a single shared enemy.

A Nation That Never Knew Peace

“Peace” has been a relative term in Myanmar since the country gained its independence in 1948. Back then, British colonial governors handed over the keys to the new leaders of a nation then called Burma, which was expected to become a parliamentary democracy. But then, as now, the group functionally granted control of the new government was the country’s ethnic majority, the Bamar.

Tracing their heritage to the Irrawaddy River basin, speaking Burmese, and today claiming some thirty-five million inhabitants, the Bamar were the obvious choice to lead. After all, had the British not put them in power, they would have been instituting a policy of minority rule, which carried its own set of problems.

But although the Bamar are the largest ethnic group, they are far from the only one. Myanmar is among the most ethnically diverse nations on Earth, with dozens, if not hundreds, of individual groups tracing their ancestry to the same sovereign land. A 2014 analysis found that even the Bamar themselves showed DNA evidence of incredible genetic diversity within their own ethnic group.

Yet the country’s very name, Burma, signaled to everybody which group was really in charge. Restive and focused on self-determination, chafing under unfavorable state interpretations on religion and culture, some ethnic groups took up arms in the very same year as independence.

Between the rise and fall of so many resistance movements, one can trace a path through time from the months after Burma’s founding to modern-day Myanmar, in what is essentially a civil war that never truly started or ended. The fighting today is not a rupture; it is the latest chapter of a struggle three generations deep.

The Long Shadow of the Tatmadaw

The other element that explains Myanmar’s situation is the role of military regimes. Juntas have been a mainstay here going back to 1962, when the military seized the country in a coup d’etat. Myanmar’s military is known as the Tatmadaw, and though it has held varying levels of power at different times, it has never been anything less than a major player.

When it ruled directly from 1962 to 1974, it nationalized industry and forced the country toward Soviet-style socialism. Under a later constitution, it ruled indirectly for another fourteen years, during which Myanmar became a pariah state and earned the dubious honor of ranking among the world’s most impoverished nations.

When pro-democracy protesters overthrew the government in 1988, the Tatmadaw ensured it remained in control despite national reforms; when another protest movement took hold in 2007, its crackdowns drew near-global condemnation. All the while, it fought ongoing, multidimensional civil wars against the various groups that opposed it, at a time when those groups had little modern weaponry and little desire beyond establishing local autonomy in their own ancestral lands.

By the mid-2010s, it seemed Myanmar might have gotten a reprieve. A general election brought a retired, Tatmadaw-backed general to office, but despite his military ties he proved a reformer. His government welcomed the first visit by a US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in over half a century, relaxed a suite of repressive laws, and released Aung San Suu Kyi, the longtime leader of Myanmar’s democratic movement.

The Coup That Backfired

For several years, Myanmar set down a path of major reform, though it also engaged in far more concerning conduct, including what many international observers agreed was a genocide against the country’s Rohingya Muslim population. Suu Kyi, for her part, proved a better candidate than a leader. Her flagging, micromanagerial style, her lack of governing experts, and her own crackdowns on minorities and dissent made clear to the Tatmadaw that she was somebody they could still control, or at least manage. The balance of internal power was comfortable for nobody, and resistance still simmered in pockets of the countryside, but most of those who held real power were willing to sit back and let the government work.

Then, in late 2020, the Tatmadaw suffered a devastating electoral defeat, its political party handed a sweeping loss in parliament. For an institution that was always paranoid, always fearful of being pushed out if the people were given a choice, the result was stunning, especially at a moment when Suu Kyi’s failures were supposed to drive people toward military leadership, not away from it. The Tatmadaw alleged fraud, but the allegations did not take, and few voices abroad endorsed them.

The military had thought it could have it both ways: let civilians govern and reap the rewards on the global stage, while controlling all the levers of power that really mattered. With such a scathing loss, that would be impossible. In the early-morning hours of February 1, 2021, Tatmadaw soldiers detained many high-ranking members of the ruling party, including Suu Kyi. The military’s leader, a reportedly power-hungry and even Machiavellian general named Min Aung Hlaing, became chairman of a new State Administration Council that would govern unilaterally.

From Protest to Insurgency

If the Tatmadaw expected acquiescence, the reality that greeted it was another crushing disappointment. Well-accustomed to self-determination after a decade of civilian rule, the people of Myanmar did not take kindly to the detention of the leader they had just re-elected. Nor did they appreciate the new junta declaring a year-long state of emergency, shutting the borders, grounding domestic and international flights, replacing civilian officials, and trying to shut down the internet. By the end of that same day, protesters were in the streets, and they would return, mostly peacefully, for about three weeks.

The protests were not massive at first, and it remains an open question whether they could have been sustained. But on February 20, nearly three weeks after the coup, the situation changed for the worse. A pair of unarmed protesters were killed in Mandalay, including a sixteen-year-old, during a standoff between police and shipyard workers. They were not the first civilians to die; a day earlier, a twenty-year-old woman had died on life support after being shot in the head ten days previously.

But the Mandalay killings were a bridge too far. Two days later, a general strike put millions of citizens in the streets.

Most governments facing millions of their own citizens in revolt would at least consider a peaceful resolution. The Tatmadaw played by a different set of rules. As in 1988 and again in 2007, it responded with immediate, unyielding violence, shooting protesters execution-style in the head and gunning them down in crowds. Protesters began bringing homemade weapons to their marches.

Improvised explosives appeared. And as the killing made urban protest unsustainable, the demonstrators fled into the countryside, especially to the less-populated north, where long-fighting ethnic militias held power and had at least some answer for how the people could fight back.

The Seeds of Rebellion

The militias the protesters joined had long histories of armed resistance against the Tatmadaw, and although they had always operated at a numeric and armament disadvantage, the protests changed the game in two critical ways. First, they drove mass numbers of new recruits to the countryside, where one protester armed with a modern cell phone and social media could entice two, five, or ten friends to follow. Second, they gave the militias a reason to look past their old, often deadly rivalries. The coup had handed Myanmar a single, clear enemy.

Out in the jungles and highlands, many took up with established militias bearing the names of the ethnic groups they swore to protect: the Kachin, the Arakan, the Pa-O, the Karen, the Chin, the Ta’ang, and many others, people with deep memories of violent repression. Others coalesced into a newly formed militia that represented not a single ethnic group but democracy itself: the People’s Defense Force, whose ranks had swelled to ten thousand or more by mid-2021.

Still others set up a civilian government-in-exile, helped along by the parliamentarians and civil leaders who had held power before the coup. Named the National Unity Government, it quickly drew militias to its banner as a way both to gather for a common cause and to legitimize their own struggles. The seeds of full-scale rebellion had been planted, and in the rich soil of Myanmar, it was all but guaranteed they would bear new life.

How the War Was Fought

The unrest did not only send recruits into the countryside; it had an equal and opposite effect on the Tatmadaw, forcing it to divert troops from rural bases and outposts back to the restive cities. Those troops had to come from somewhere, and often they came from exactly the areas the militias had set their sights on. Two features of Myanmar’s conflict define everything that followed.

The first is ceasefires. A truce between the Tatmadaw and an individual ethnic militia is a common affair, but such ceasefires are easily made and easily broken. It is entirely within the norm for a militia to agree to a ceasefire in a zone, spend weeks or months consolidating, and then attack again, and just as common for the Tatmadaw to do the same. Even groups nominally at peace before the coup never assumed they and the military were friends forever.

They knew which outposts they wanted, which zones they wanted to control, and which communities would serve them best as captured territory.

The second is how the Tatmadaw organizes itself. Myanmar rarely goes to war with neighbors. Thailand and Laos are cooperative; India and Indonesia are too powerful and distant for military interaction; clashes with Bangladesh amount to mutual irritation more than threats to sovereignty; and China, to the north, exerts tremendous influence and will not be confronted by the Tatmadaw anytime soon, or probably ever. The military has therefore always been primarily a force for internal fighting and repression, and it built a structure to match.

The Pyramid and Its Cracks

The Tatmadaw is present throughout Myanmar’s territory, organized in a pyramid. At the top sit the major strongholds: the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw, plus a few exceptionally well-defended bases. Below them are fourteen regional command centers, each holding down a geographic region with a massive, well-defended garrison. The next level down comprises hundreds of minor bases, typically a few dozen to a few hundred troops near population centers, along with strategically significant points like border checkpoints, minor airstrips, and helipads.

At the bottom are the outposts, and a great many of them: rural representations of the junta where a few troops with guns, a couple of jeeps, and maybe a pickup with a machine gun spend their days keeping order in small villages. These outposts serve as both a first line of defense against small insurgent attacks and a trip-wire to trigger a larger response if one, or two, or three vanish off the map. In all, the Tatmadaw is believed to have maintained roughly five thousand individual military positions inside Myanmar before this war’s current stage.

Once the violence kicked off in earnest, the militias with offensives already underway saw the quickest victories. In March 2021, the Kachin Independence Army exploited the outflow of Tatmadaw troops to capture a base near the northern town of Laiza outright. Fighting through the night with two battalions, the Kachin took the site and dug in.

When the junta counterattacked, an advancing column of about a hundred soldiers was destroyed so efficiently that only two or three survived; fighter jets and artillery could not retake the base, and nearly forty government soldiers were captured. Elsewhere, more militias struck nearby bases. Rattled, the junta proposed a ceasefire, but the Kachin kept fighting, claiming the Tatmadaw had never truly stopped attacking.

The First Battles and the Weapons Gap

Seeing the tide turn, several groups that had signed a so-called Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement abandoned the deal and declared loyalty to the National Unity Government. By late April came the first large-scale battle of the conflict: the Battle of Mindat, fought between the Tatmadaw and the Chinland Defense Force, an ethnic Chin militia that used superior numbers and home terrain to ambush military convoys. After a brief ceasefire, the fighting worsened. The Chin seized improved weapons from a convoy to strengthen their defense, but a prolonged shelling campaign eventually pushed them out of Mindat, along with several thousand fleeing residents, in a nominal junta victory.

It was a hollow one. With the military accused of using civilians as human shields and committing mass sexual violence against the women who remained, and with the Chin’s many convoy successes, Mindat became a resistance symbol that drove ever more fighters to the countryside.

In these early days, weapons availability dictated everything. Scrappy and experienced as they were, the militias were mostly underequipped for anything more intense than a duel at dawn. Single-shot hunting rifles known as “tumi” were the most common arms, joined by the occasional aging Kalashnikov or improvised explosive.

Some groups could trade for better weapons or take them from defectors and surrendered soldiers, but ammunition remained a constant constraint. Against a military fielding modern warplanes, artillery, personnel carriers, and fighting vehicles, the only path was to do what the Chin had done at Mindat: rely on ambushes, traps, greater numbers when possible, and deep knowledge of local terrain to stack the deck.

Scorched Earth and the Spiral of 2021

The trouble with that approach is that it is far harder on offense than on defense, and with the junta working to lock down the country, the early months of the war saw more of the same: local clashes, ambushes against convoys and small outposts, and occasional larger operations when fighting militias could commit the personnel and weaponry. The current civil war is widely cited as having begun on May 5, 2021, when the National Unity Government formally created its armed wing, the People’s Defense Force. By September, the National Unity Government declared itself at war with the junta, claiming a summer of fighting had already left some 1,700 junta troops dead amid hundreds of small bombings, dozens of firefights, and frequent regime counterattacks.

It was around this time that the junta began searching for ways to end the conflict suddenly. Knowing the rebels could beat it in guerrilla fighting, it fell back on its advantage: heavy weaponry. But the rebels were too well-hidden in dense jungle, behind every corner and beneath every stone. Their families, however, could not hide.

Once the junta realized the country would not be pacified easily, it turned on the communities of the rebel militias even more than on the militias themselves, burning homes, laying waste to crops, and massacring suspected collaborators. It turned to its warplanes, untouchable for the resistance at this stage, in what human rights groups alleged was a mass bombing campaign against civilians.

The toll is hard to assess. Without anyone maintaining a consistent nationwide tally, many of the dead have likely never been counted. But people were displaced in the hundreds of thousands, and 2024 estimates suggest nearly two hundred schools and universities were damaged or destroyed, likely only a fraction of the human infrastructure affected. By the end of 2021, the insurgency had caught such fire that Myanmar was clearly spiraling toward something even bigger.

Too much had happened; too many had abandoned their old lives. The resistance was gathering better guns, land mines, and explosives; its recruits were nearly trained, some already blooded. The militias were communicating, coordinating, and learning to strike isolated targets with impunity, knowing that if the junta tried to stamp out one group, it left blind spots for ten others.

The Belligerents: The Regime and Its Allies

With the war well underway and most ethnic groups having decided whether to fight or sit out, it is worth stepping back to survey Myanmar in the grand view. Because ceasefires are made and broken so easily, not every faction fights at the same time, in the same direction, for the same purpose at any given moment. But it is rare for major players to switch sides; whether fighting or not on a given day, a group typically remains consistent in which side’s victory it prefers.

At the center stands the Tatmadaw and its state allies, the national border guard and local law enforcement. Thought to have a pre-war strength of three to four hundred thousand active personnel, its true numbers are disputed; 2024 estimates suggest closer to 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers. Its army is by far the most powerful branch, with roughly a thousand light and main battle tanks, a couple thousand heavy armored vehicles, well over a thousand multiple-rocket launcher systems, well over a thousand towed and mobile artillery pieces, and unknown numbers of ballistic missiles.

Its air force fielded thirty-eight modern MiG-29 fighters before the war, backed by a handful of Su-30 and JF-17 jets and several dozen older Chinese-supplied aircraft, which do very well against scattered militias with no way to fight back. Its navy has proven largely irrelevant, but its intelligence apparatus is robust, ruthless, and rich with informants at every level of society. The Tatmadaw also enjoys manufacturing power, producing small arms, machine and anti-aircraft guns, ammunition, bombs, mines, and explosives at factories across the country.

Yet it has real weaknesses. Personnel numbers are often overstated; morale and dedication were questionable even before the war; and the readiness of its tanks and fighter-bombers was uncertain, with no clear indicator of how many assets were actually fight-worthy. The Tatmadaw is also defined by its depravity, long documented by human rights groups: extrajudicial executions and disappearances, torture, rape and sexual violence, forced labor, routine use of child soldiers, indiscriminate attacks on civilian settlements, and atrocities against the Rohingya that amount to genocide. It is funded by a vast business empire whose hooks reach deep into many sectors, worth the kyat equivalent of tens of billions of US dollars.

The junta is not without friends. The Border Guard Forces, made up of former insurgent groups now subordinated to the military, have been a substantial auxiliary, a relic of the 2010s civilian experiment. So have paramilitary People’s Militias, which formed within villages out of fear of resistance retribution and now run intelligence networks in rural Myanmar.

Some ethnic militias side with the junta rather than against it, including the Tai Lai, the Lisu, and the Zomi, often groups that have suffered at the hands of more powerful neighbors and seek the enemy of their enemy as a friend. And even groups that largely oppose the regime, like the Pa-O, the Kachin, and the Karen, must contend with pro-government counter-militias on their own territory.

The Belligerents: The Resistance and the Neutrals

Against the junta stands a mind-boggling number of resistance organizations, so many it would take hours just to recite their names. The largest is the People’s Defense Force, the armed wing of the National Unity Government. Rather than drawing from a single ethnic group, it is an amalgamation of freedom fighters from all across Myanmar, urban and rural, many from the Bamar majority, with recent estimates suggesting as many as a hundred thousand fighters or more, including thousands of deserters from the military and police.

Beyond the single-shot rifles of the early war, the People’s Defense Force has seized assault rifles and other firearms and launched arms-manufacturing programs to build rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, and ammunition. It is well-organized, with regional commands fielding brigades that subdivide into battalions and companies, and it maintains units in areas controlled by ethnic minorities, generally placing itself at the service of local rebel leaders. It also maintains several hundred local defense forces, usually defending individual townships and relying on their communities to stay afloat.

Then come the ethnic militias, many tracing their legacy to independent Myanmar’s earliest days. Among the largest and most powerful is the Kachin Independence Army, a coalition of ethnic Kachin tribes in the north, rich off the trade of jade and gold, with tens of thousands of fighters. The Karen National Liberation Army is of similar size and considerable success, while the Pa-O and Karenni maintain their own formidable standing militias.

There is also the Three Brotherhood Alliance, a tripartite union between the powerful Arakan Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army. Formed in 2019, before the coup, the alliance claims upward of sixty thousand fighters as of 2024, though its true numbers are likely lower. It will play a central role in the war’s later phases.

Finally, there are the neutrals. Most prominent are the Wa, an ethnic minority near the Chinese border, strongly backed by China, militarily formidable, with no desire to expand their borders and a massive drug empire sending methamphetamines across the Indo-Pacific. The neutrals also include the Rohingya, the same population that suffered genocide at the Tatmadaw’s hands and now increasingly suffers similar violence from ethnic militias, particularly the Arakan Army.

Some Rohingya organize into militias not to collaborate with the junta but out of urgent need for self-protection, which often leaves the Tatmadaw and the Rohingya shooting at the same people despite no love lost between them. Rounding out the neutrals are scattered local militias whose sole aim is to keep both junta and rebels away from their communities.

Stalemate, Monsoons, and the Tide Turning

After the upheaval of 2021, the war got well and truly underway in 2022. With the resistance coalescing, winning local support, and training recruits, the pressure was on the junta to turn the tables. Between November 2021 and the summer of 2022, it tried and failed. It launched ambushes, massacred villages of suspected rebels, and bombarded townships in what Amnesty International and others condemned as collective punishment.

It attacked religious sites, executed political prisoners, and killed children in an airstrike that devastated a school in the village of Yet Let Kone. Again and again, it proved unable to corner resistance cells, who escaped into the countryside once the heavy weapons drew near.

These reprisals were devastating to rebels whose families were caught in the violence, but they were all but worthless for the junta’s aims. Rather than breaking local will, they embittered communities and ended any good faith between regime and country. The Tatmadaw took a very long time to learn this lesson, continuing devastating airstrikes for years. What it did achieve was to push the resistance into the countryside, leaving the cities, especially Yangon, Mandalay, and Naypyidaw, mostly stable to this day.

But the rebels did not lose interest. As junta forces consolidated, the resistance trimmed out regime allies who threatened them, launching an assassination campaign that killed hundreds of Tatmadaw officers in months. They rooted out informants through counterintelligence, and in direct answer to the bombings, they began attacking Tatmadaw pilots in their own homes, bringing the pain of warfare back to those responsible. When monsoon season grounded the junta’s aircraft, the rebels surged and seized more territory.

The Arakan Army began administering its conquered land and, by year’s end, broke its ceasefire to join the fight outright. Some estimates suggested a full fifty percent of Myanmar was under rebel control by that summer.

As 2022 became 2023, the successes mounted. Near Mandalay, a People’s Defense Force group established a strong presence in a town of 125,000 and held it against a junta counterattack of perhaps more than a thousand troops with artillery and air support, forcing the Tatmadaw to run for the hills. Rebels on the water attacked supply ships; inland groups made roads impassable; and consumer-grade drones spread through the countryside.

In August 2023, eleven rebel groups combined in a drone assault on the town of Sagaing that killed seventeen Tatmadaw soldiers. The junta answered with aerial bombing so severe that residents who had lived through the World War II Burma campaign judged it considerably worse. Through that summer, the junta was forced from more towns, abandoned more outposts, lost more roads and checkpoints, and suffered growing defections from once-friendly militias who saw it was betting on the losing side.

The International Angle: China’s Calculated Game

While this unfolded in the jungles, an equally important battle played out further from the limelight. Foreign powers have always exerted strong influence over the land called Myanmar, from British colonial occupation to the Japanese Empire in World War II. In the twenty-first century, the nation with the most influence by far is China.

In the early days after the coup, China was openly unconcerned with Myanmar’s change in leadership; it is an open question whether the Tatmadaw would have acted without some signal of Chinese tolerance. What is clearer is Beijing’s posture afterward. China dismissed the coup as a mere “major cabinet reshuffle,” stood by the Tatmadaw, tolerated its mass displacements and crimes against humanity, attacked the West for sanctioning it, and supplied the equivalent of a quarter-billion dollars in arms, probably more. Throughout the war, China continued building roads, railways, and pipelines inside Myanmar to secure its own direct access to the Indian Ocean, a project expected to draw total investment over thirty-five billion US dollars.

For Beijing, stability has always been the priority. The coup was a minor inconvenience that did not threaten Chinese business interests; arguably it helped, installing a regime that would not dare challenge Beijing. Since the Tatmadaw had the troops, the guns, the money, the cities, and the airplanes, it was the partner China chose to support, and any atrocities were acceptable so long as they did not interfere with Beijing’s bottom line.

But the relationship was never warm. The junta could not assert control over the border areas China cared about most, forcing reliance on fragile links with jungle militias and unwanted pressure on the Wa. It could not stop drugs or refugees flowing northward. Its most notable sin was its failure to crack down on a vast online scam industry, where tens of thousands of trafficked Chinese nationals were imprisoned in deadly compounds and forced to run scams against wealthy people back home, a failure perhaps rooted in suspected payoffs.

China Hedges Its Bets

As the resistance surged through late 2023, China appears to have concluded that backing the Tatmadaw unconditionally was neither worthwhile nor smart. It allegedly smuggled arms and ammunition to militias, provided other support, and publicly advocated for rebel groups seeking temporary ceasefires. The resistance, for its part, sweetened the deal: it was the ethnic militias, not the regime, that raided scam compounds, freed hundreds of Chinese nationals, issued arrest warrants for ringleaders, and established friendly relations at the border checkpoints they had taken over.

This does not mean China has switched sides. Recognizing that the Tatmadaw still holds the cities, financial institutions, and most southern ports, Beijing has worked to keep its junta ties intact while courting the rebels, playing both sides of the conflict for the long term despite the inherent risks. Other nations do their own business with the regime: Russia has welcomed closer ties, India keeps things cordial, and Thailand remains mostly open to cooperation.

But China matters most, and it has proven willing to support and work with both sides. A China that prioritizes security above all else will shape whatever comes next.

Operation 1027 and the Cascade

The war’s newest phase opened with Operation 1027, named for its launch date, October 27, 2023, a coordinated offensive planned by the Three Brotherhood Alliance. In rapid assaults, rebels took numerous checkpoints near Lashio, the largest settlement in Shan State, captured a nearby town and its vital trading post with China, and cleared no fewer than fifty-seven local bases while withstanding aerial bombardment. Junta counterattacks were disrupted and forced to flee.

Within days, half a dozen towns and a strategic bridge fell, and a prominent brigadier general was killed. Weathering alleged chemical attacks, the rebels refused to halt, and more of Shan State collapsed.

In Rakhine State, the Arakan Army broke its ceasefire, forcing dozens of outposts to be abandoned and taking a major town on the doorstep of the state capital, Sittwe, along with a substantial military base. By December the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army was fighting the Battle of Laukkai, and by January 4, 2024, the city was entirely taken, with rebel commanders setting to work eviscerating its scam industry, much to China’s pleasant surprise.

To understand why this mattered, recall the Tatmadaw’s pyramid and add one factor: the low and falling morale of its soldiers. The average garrison at a far-flung outpost is not a band of die-hard loyalists. They are scared, isolated, outnumbered, and mostly indifferent to the regime beyond the livelihood it provides. When a militia they cannot beat encroaches, they do not stay for a firefight; they take what they can, leave what they must, and retreat to defensible ground rather than die for a patch of land.

The Largest Surrender in Myanmar’s History

Operation 1027 turned isolated retreats into a cascade. Now it was not one encircled outpost fleeing but dozens, each aware of a massive rebel advance and aware that the neighboring garrisons would not hold either, so why should anyone? Junta troops fled in larger and larger numbers, abandoning outposts entirely, and when pinned down they surrendered en masse rather than die in what they saw as a pointless battle. By January 2024, the National Unity Government counted a minimum of 4,000 military defections, four thousand in roughly three months, against fourteen thousand across the nearly three years since the coup.

At Laukkai, rebels forced the largest military surrender in Myanmar’s history, with nearly 2,400 personnel, including six brigadier generals, laying down their weapons rather than defending the town. With each retreat, rout, defection, and surrender, the rebels found it easier to take more targets and more territory, capturing ever-larger equipment caches. The junta’s response, withholding pay, randomly checking soldiers’ phones, and demanding troops be guarded even in their own bases, only deepened resentment and a culture of fear that made surrender come faster.

Operation 1027 broke the stalemate and sent the Tatmadaw running across much of the country. Seeing the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s success, other powerful militias including the People’s Defense Force launched offensives of their own. Karenni factions took most of Loikaw, a city of 51,000.

Chin fighters drove junta forces into India and locked down much of the border, ratified their own constitution, and proclaimed the self-governing state of Chinland. Operation 1027 brought global attention, better weapons, new recruits, and unprecedented territorial gains, but above all it brought momentum, forcing the junta to abandon offensive action almost entirely and prepare to defend Naypyidaw. Using anti-aircraft weapons captured from seized bases, the rebels could now deter regime aircraft, all but eliminating air raids in many villages and bringing real security home.

The State of the Conflict in 2024

Since the start of 2024, things have only worsened for the junta. In Rakhine State, the Arakan Army has pushed regime troops out of everywhere except Sittwe and three or four other pockets where major bases remain. The Chin have taken almost all their claimed territory, leaving only their local capital, Hakha, and a couple of spots under regime control.

The Shan, the Ta’ang, and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army have consolidated their areas. The sparsely populated north is a patchwork of junta and Kachin land, but the regime forces there cannot push back. The People’s Defense Force has taken much of the country’s center and is beginning to claim pockets by which it can encircle Mandalay.

To the south, the Karen and the Mon hold considerable territory. In total, the junta exerts unchallenged control over only about a fifth of the country, though Mandalay, Naypyidaw, and Yangon appear relatively safe for now.

The year brought major defeats and few victories. In February, the regime lost several landing ships on the coast to an Arakan advance. From March to June, the Arakan withstood naval shelling and air attack, killed quite possibly thousands of junta soldiers, drove hundreds into Bangladesh, and took the resistance’s first major airport at Thandwe. By December they had locked down the entire Bangladesh border, culminating in a bloody battle around the Border Guard Police Barracks Five in the north.

Once Sittwe falls, Rakhine State will be completely liberated.

Elsewhere, the Chin chased the junta out of much of their territory and forced mass surrenders. The Tatmadaw’s efforts to play militias against each other failed, while rebel groups defined their boundaries and mostly avoided devolving into ethnic violence. In the battle for Lashio, the resistance battered the regime from all directions and took the Northeastern Command Headquarters, the first of fourteen regional commands to fall.

New factions rose, including the Kayan National Army, formed from several Karenni organizations. In April, the People’s Defense Force launched a major coordinated drone attack against not just the capital but the personal residence of Min Aung Hlaing himself. He survived, but the symbolism was unmistakable: the rebels are coming, and there is nothing the junta can do to stop it.

The Junta’s Desperate Gambles

Unable to act proactively, the junta took ever-collapsing defensive positions and grasped for anything that could turn the tide. In February 2024 it made a major gamble, instituting military conscription in the cities, and the policy backfired almost immediately and entirely predictably. City-dwellers had already had every chance to join voluntarily and chosen not to; now those who had not considered fleeing decided to get out. The law ultimately rounded up a few thousand draftees, who began training in April before shipping to the front, but the fear it created was so all-encompassing that it was not worth the trouble.

The junta’s efforts to gather weaponry fell short, and attempts to clamp down on internet access had only limited success. In April 2024, a controversy around the still-imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi reminded the world that the regime still held her life as a bargaining chip, but it proved an empty threat for a rebel alliance that increasingly sees the seventy-eight-year-old as tangential, at best, to the Myanmar it hopes to build.

Myanmar has now entered what will likely be the endgame of its civil war, a final phase pitting the resistance against the cities and major bases where the Tatmadaw is strongest. This will be harder than anything the rebels have done. Pushed into fewer defensible points, the Tatmadaw can mass huge numbers of troops at each location and bring out the heavy artillery and warplanes it could not risk losing at the front.

Its soldiers, fearing death at rebel hands, will be more willing to fight to the death, and those who might surrender will be watched by comrades in a tense situation where nobody knows whom to trust. The rebels’ strategy of forcing many concurrent encirclements will reach its limit, and they will have to go head-to-head, a fight they are far less likely to win, where the junta’s sheer firepower matters far more.

Paths to a Resolution

There are a few ways the resistance could force an end. It could attempt a massive, coordinated direct assault on one city or base at a time, but that would be ruinous and high in casualties. It could appeal directly to China, but Beijing’s interest is stability no matter who takes power, and a settlement could just as easily usher in a new round of fighting among the surviving Tatmadaw, the National Unity Government, and the ethnic militias.

The rebels could encircle the cities and starve them out, a lengthy and painful affair. In a best-case scenario that also seems fairly likely, they could stir up popular revolt among the city dwellers antagonized by conscription and crackdowns. Or there is the stalemate option: although the Tatmadaw could not launch a major offensive in the next decade, it might force the rebels to leave it alone inside its own power base, letting the war fizzle out rather than end in clear victory.

Myanmar After the War

If the war ends at some point with the Tatmadaw’s regime substantially diminished, the ultimate question becomes what peace even looks like. This is a nation that has never known true peace, where resistance has often been the first instinct of groups facing a national government trying to assert itself. This war is more deeply factional, among a nation more profoundly divided, than perhaps any other on Earth, making the territorial spatter-paintings of Syria or Libya look orderly by comparison.

Each ethnic militia is, for the most part, concerned with the ethnic group it represents: the Arakan Army cares about the Arakan, the Kachin Independence Army about the Kachin, and so on. But the National Unity Government and its People’s Defense Force are focused on a nationwide government. While all sides battle a common enemy, that difference is easy to stomach.

But in a future where nation-building matters more than fighting, there is no telling whether the National Unity Government and the ethnic militias will align, or whether the militias, now forming self-governing territories, would accept the National Unity Government’s authority at all. Having spent years and countless lives escaping one ruler’s boot, why submit to another?

Then there is the Tatmadaw itself, which might be conclusively defeated or might not, but will remain a major political factor regardless. A unified Myanmar would need a military, and the Tatmadaw possesses not just the weapons but the structures and institutional knowledge to build one. A government could conceivably start from scratch with foreign loans and cheap equipment, but the far likelier outcome is that some vestige of the current military survives, bringing the political Tatmadaw with it. The military could give up political power, as it has in limited ways before, but a future in which it surrenders its arsenal too is probably not even worth hoping for.

Four Futures for a Fractured Nation

For all the genuinely impressive collaboration of the resistance, focusing on its unity risks forgetting the broader reality of peacetime. The war’s end will leave no fewer than a dozen major landholding factions on their own territory, all well-armed and well-entrenched, but none able to defeat the others. The National Unity Government could not beat the ethnic militias, the militias could not take over the country and largely do not want to, and even individual ethnic groups will face opposition militias from their own communities who fought for the Tatmadaw. If the regime survives, it too will be able to defend itself but unable to conquer anyone else.

Broadly, there appear to be four key possibilities. Option one is a strong unity government, making Myanmar as cohesive a nation as any other. Option two is a confederacy, with each landholding ethnic group, and those that hold no territory, tending to their own lands autonomously while relying on a central government for diplomacy, defense, and resource distribution.

Option three is a very weak unity government or none at all, with the many groups, including the majority Bamar, breaking into functionally autonomous states or declaring independence, with no guarantee against descent into internecine warfare. Option four, in a Myanmar that still has a standing military, is another coup, in a country that has never escaped the power of a military regime.

Some options sound better than others. A true unity government able to represent the many peoples of Myanmar would be an incredible boon, the kind of change that could shift society on its axis and unlock potential long denied. A confederacy might prove better still, abandoning the attempt to force a nation of many cultures into one and offering a more pluralistic path. At the very least, any outcome that leads away from war rather than back toward it would be preferable for the people there, whatever their individual allegiances.

What the rest of this war brings cannot be known for certain. It will be violent, quite possibly ruinous, and any lasting peace will be difficult and complicated to establish. But for Myanmar there is no other option. This current civil war has lasted three years, but the country has been at war for over three generations without pause. Its people deserve better, and with a great deal of luck, they just might find their way to something better when this war finally concludes for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the current Myanmar Civil War begin, and what triggered it?

The current phase is rooted in the Tatmadaw’s coup of February 1, 2021, when soldiers detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other officials after the military’s political party suffered a sweeping electoral defeat in late 2020. The war is widely cited as having formally begun on May 5, 2021, when the National Unity Government created its armed wing, the People’s Defense Force.

Who are the main parties fighting in the war?

On one side is the ruling military junta, the Tatmadaw, with allies including the Border Guard Forces, People’s Militias, and some ethnic militias that side with the regime. Against them is a vast resistance: the People’s Defense Force (the armed wing of the exiled National Unity Government) plus dozens of ethnic militias such as the Kachin Independence Army, the Karen National Liberation Army, and the Three Brotherhood Alliance. A few groups, such as the Wa and many Rohingya, remain neutral.

What was Operation 1027 and why did it matter?

Operation 1027 was a coordinated offensive launched on October 27, 2023, by the Three Brotherhood Alliance. It seized dozens of bases and towns in Shan State and triggered a cascade of junta retreats and surrenders, including the largest military surrender in Myanmar’s history at Laukkai, where nearly 2,400 personnel and six brigadier generals laid down their arms. It broke the war’s stalemate and shifted the junta entirely onto the defensive.

What role does China play in the conflict?

China is the most influential foreign power. It initially backed the junta for the sake of stability, dismissing the coup as a “cabinet reshuffle,” supplying arms, and continuing infrastructure projects to secure access to the Indian Ocean. As the resistance surged, and after rebels rather than the regime dismantled the cross-border online scam compounds China cared about, Beijing began hedging, supporting both sides while keeping its junta ties intact.

Could a rebel victory bring lasting peace?

Not easily. Even a defeated junta would leave more than a dozen well-armed, well-entrenched factions, none able to conquer the others. The ethnic militias prioritize their own communities, while the National Unity Government seeks a nationwide state, and the two may not align. Four broad futures are possible: a strong unity government, a confederacy, fragmentation into autonomous or independent states, or yet another military coup.