Media reports say that Gen. Min Aung Hlaing accused the People’s Defence Forces of using “administrative buildings and innocent civilians as human shields”. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Myanmar’s embattled junta chief has warned civilians in territory recently captured by ethnic minority armed groups to prepare for military counterattacks, state media reported on Wednesday.

The military has lost swaths of territory near the border with China in northern Shan state to an alliance of armed ethnic minority groups and “People’s Defence Forces” battling to overturn its 2021 coup.

The groups have seized a regional military command and taken control of lucrative border trade crossings, prompting rare public criticism by military supporters of the junta’s top leadership.

Junta troops “will… launch counterattacks”, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing said on Tuesday in the Shan state capital Taunggyi, according to the Global New Light of Myanmar.

He accused the alliance of using “administrative buildings and innocent civilians as human shields”, according to the newspaper.

“Therefore, the people residing in towns and villages where the terrorists unlawfully occupied should be aware of security so as not to face exploitation.”

The junta is battling widespread armed opposition and its soldiers are accused of bloody rampages and using air and artillery strikes to punish civilian communities.

It announced this week that the three main ethnic minority armed groups battling the military in Shan state had been officially declared “terrorist” organisations.

The declaration will not affect the fighting against the Arakan Army (AA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), however those found supporting or contacting them can now face legal action.

The alliance and PDF groups have battled closer to the second city of Mandalay, home to around 1.5 million people and the military’s central command.

Opponents of the military launched a rocket attack on Mandalay on Tuesday, damaging buildings and wounding one person, local media reported, in a rare attack on an urban area.

An opinion piece in Wednesday’s Global New Light of Myanmar criticised the military’s recent losses in Shan state.

“Who would have thought that Lashio would fall,” it said, referring to a Shan town of 150,000 people that was captured last month.

“Who would then give the definite assurance that nothing will happen to whatever you own in Mandalay?”

“Once the artillery shells started to rain down upon the city, it would be too late to move out of the city in an orderly manner,” it said.

File picture of Army officers stand guard as police officers patrol in Lashio, northern Shan State, Myanmar.
| Photo Credit: AP

Myanmar’s junta and an ethnic minority armed group both claimed on July 25 they were in control of a town and regional military command in northern Shan state following days of clashes.

Fighting has rocked the town of Lashio, home to the military’s northeastern command, since July 3 when an alliance of ethnic armed groups renewed an offensive against junta troops.

Local media run by the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) reported the group “fully captured the headquarters of the Northeast Military command in Lashio” on Thursday morning and also captured Lashio town, home to around 1,50,000 people.

MNDAA spokesman Li Jiawen said the group’s fighters had captured Lashio, without giving further details.

But junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun told reporters the claim was “not true”.

“The insurgents infiltrated the outskirts of Lashio so (the security forces) have been following and clearing them,” he said, without giving details.

The northeastern command is located in the north of Lashio.

A video uploaded to social media with a caption saying it was shot in Lashio on July 25 morning showed deserted streets with no soldiers in sight.

AFP reporters geolocated the video to a site in the town around two kilometres from the command.

Northern Shan state has been rocked by fighting since late last month when an alliance of ethnic armed groups renewed an offensive against the military along the highway to China’s Yunnan province.

The clashes have shredded a Beijing-brokered truce that in January halted a campaign by the alliance of the Arakan Army (AA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) and the MNDAA.

The military has carried out several air strikes around the town during the fighting, according to residents.

Dozens of civilians have been killed or wounded in the recent fighting, according to the junta and local rescue groups.

Neither the junta nor the ethnic alliance have released figures on their own casualties.

Indonesia’s Foreign Minister on July 25 slammed the junta’s unwillingness to engage with a regional peace plan to resolve the conflict, speaking after meeting her Singaporean counterpart on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations Foreign Ministers meeting in Laos.

Both Singapore and Indonesia have been critical of the junta’s power grab, which has divided the 10-member ASEAN bloc.

China ‘close attention’

Myanmar’s borderlands are home to myriad ethnic armed groups who have battled the military since independence from Britain in 1948 for autonomy and control of lucrative resources.

Some have given shelter and training to newer “People’s Defence Forces” (PDFs) that have sprung up to battle the military after the coup in 2021.

China is a major ally and arms supplier to the junta, but analysts say it also maintains ties with armed ethnic groups in Myanmar that hold territory near its border.

Beijing was “paying close attention to the situation in northern Myanmar” and urged a halt to the fighting, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a press conference on July 25.

It had also urged relevant parties “to not endanger the safety of China’s borders and border residents, as well as Chinese projects, firms, and personnel in Myanmar”, she said.

Three people had been killed and 10 wounded in military air strikes on the MNDAA-held city of Laukkai on the border with China this week, MNDAA’s Li Jiawen said, adding that the wounded included three Chinese nationals.

The armed group captured Laukkai in January after around 2,000 junta troops surrendered, in one of the military’s biggest single defeats in decades.

New fighting has broken out in northeastern Myanmar, bringing an end to a Chinese-brokered ceasefire and putting pressure on the military regime as it faces attacks from resistance forces on multiple fronts in the country’s civil war.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army, one of three powerful militias that launched a surprise joint offensive last October, renewed its attacks on regime positions last week in the northeastern Shan State, which borders China, Laos, and Thailand, and the neighbouring Mandalay region with the support of local forces there.

Since then, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army has joined in, and by Friday, combined forces from the two allied militias had reportedly encircled the strategically important city of Lashio, the headquarters of the regime’s northeastern military command.

‘Safety of people’

This is the next phase of October’s “1027” offensive, said Lway Yay Oo, spokesperson for the TNLA, which last week said the military provoked retaliation with artillery and airstrikes despite the cease-fire. “In phase two, our number one aim is the eradication of the military dictatorship, and number two is the protection and safety of local people,” she said.

Thet Swe, a spokesperson for the military regime, which seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, accused the militias of putting civilians in jeopardy by restarting the fighting. “As the TNLA are starting to violate the ceasefire, the Tatmadaw is protecting the lives and the property of the ethnic people,” he said in an email, referring to the military by its Burmese name.

There was no indication that the third ethnic armed organisation that makes up the Three Brotherhood Alliance, the powerful Arakan Army, has joined in the renewed fighting in Shan state.

The TNLA claims to have already captured more than 30 army outposts, and to now control the western part of Mogok, whose ruby mines make it a lucrative target. There is also fighting for the town of Kyaukme, which sits at a highway crossroads, and Nawnghkio to the southwest, which leads toward the major military garrison town of Pyin Oo Lwin along the same highway.

“That’s where you need to cut it off to prevent the military from sending reinforcements,” said Morgan Michaels, a Singapore-based analyst with the International Institute of Strategic Studies who runs its Myanmar Conflict Map project.

In Mandalay, the region west of Shan, a local People’s Defence Force — one of many armed resistance groups that have sprung up in support of the underground National Unity Government, which views itself as Myanmar’s legitimate administration — joined the TNLA’s offensive.

Osmond, a spokesperson for the Mandalay People’s Defence Force who would only give his nom de guerre because of safety concerns, said his and other local resistance groups have seized nearly 20 military outposts.

The October offensive by the Three Brotherhood Alliance made rapid advances as the militias took large expanses of territory in the north and northeast, including multiple important border crossings with China and several major military bases.

Chinese ties

The alliance militias have close ties to China, and it’s widely believed that the offensive had Beijing’s tacit approval because of its growing dissatisfaction with the military regime’s seeming indifference to the burgeoning drug trade along its border and the proliferation of centres in Myanmar at which cyberscams are run, with workers trafficked from China.

China then helped broker the ceasefire in January, bringing the major fighting in the northeast to an end.

With the renewed violence in the northeast, China’s Foreign Ministry said it stood ready to again provide support for peace talks, but would not say whether it had been in direct contact with the Three Brotherhood Alliance or the military State Administration Council.

“China urges all parties in Myanmar to earnestly abide by the ceasefire agreement, exercise maximum restraint, disengage on the ground as soon as possible, and take practical and effective measures to ensure the tranquillity of the China-Myanmar border and the safety of Chinese personnel and projects,” the Ministry said in a faxed reply to questions.

The Myanmar army doesn’t appear to have been surprised by the TNLA attacks, with evidence that it mobilised forces and prepared defences as well as security checkpoints and patrols ahead of the renewed offensive, Mr. Michaels said.

“They didn’t get caught completely off guard, although they’ve not been able to respond yet, there’s been no counter-offensive,” he said.

Objectives unclear

It is not yet clear what the TNLA’s objectives are, and it could be that the group is just looking to expand gains and consolidate positions now while the military is stretched thin by fighting on several fronts, and before new batches of conscripts are trained for service.

Likewise, with the MNDAA, it is not clear whether it is planning to join the broader offensive or whether it intends to take encircled Lashio by force, lay siege to it, or simply tie up the troops now trapped there. The group did not respond to requests for comment.

A villager walks in a flourishing poppy field at Nampatka village, Northern Shan State, Myanmar
| Photo Credit: AP

Conflict-ravaged Myanmar is “facing challenges” in stemming opium poppy cultivation, the junta said on Wednesday, months after the United Nations said the country had become the world’s biggest producer of the narcotic substances.

Myanmar’s legal economy has been gutted by conflict and instability since the military seized power in 2021 and sparked a widespread armed uprising.

The country was “severely facing challenges related to opium poppy cultivation”, the junta’s Home Affairs Minister Lieutenant General Yar Pyae said in a statement carried by the state-owned Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

He said there had been a “slight increase” in illegal cultivation of opium poppy — essential for producing heroin — in 2023 compared to the previous year.

According to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime, Myanmar produced an estimated 1,080 tonnes of opium in 2023, up from 790 the year before, That harvest made Myanmar the world’s biggest producer of opium poppy in 2023 after production in Afghanistan slumped to around 330 tonnes following the Taliban government’s ban on poppy cultivation.

Mr. Yar Pyae accused some of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups of manufacturing synthetic drugs using precursor chemicals imported from Myanmar’s neighbours.

The Southeast Asian nation’s borderlands are home to a plethora of ethnic armed groups, many of which have fought the military for control of local resources and over the drug trade.

Myanmar’s military launched a second day of air strikes on Wednesday, bombing territory controlled by an ethnic armed group on the border with China, a rebel spokesman told AFP.

The strikes come as the military battles an alliance of armed groups across a northern region that is home to Chinese investment and where the junta says it has lost ground.

A military jet struck a site near the town of Laiza in Kachin state at 12:45 p.m. local time (0615 GMT), Kachin Independence Army (KIA) spokesman Colonel Naw Bu told AFP.

He said there were no details yet on casualties from the strike, adding that it came a day after a jet dropped three bombs on Laiza, killing one person and wounding twelve others.

On Tuesday soldiers and officers were killed when the KIA attempted to seize a major road in Kachin state, according to the junta-controlled Global Light of New Myanmar newspaper.

The military said it had carried out an “appropriate counterattack” without giving details.

The “neighbouring country had been warned in advance”, it said.

In the neighbouring northern Shan state, thousands of people have been reportedly displaced after three other ethnic armed groups launched coordinated attacks on the junta last Friday.

Shan is home to oil and gas pipelines that supply China and a planned billion-dollar rail link, part of Beijing’s Belt and Road global infrastructure project.

On Tuesday China’s Minister for Public Security met junta chief Min Aung Hlaing in the capital Naypyidaw, Myanmar state media said, for a second day of talks with top junta officials about the clashes.

They discussed attacks by the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) ethnic armed group “on security camps… with attempts to deteriorate peace and stability in the region”, the Global New Light said.

The MNDAA, along with the Arakan Army (AA) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) say they have seized sections of key roads to China — Myanmar’s biggest trade partner — since the beginning of their Friday offensive.

On Wednesday the groups said they were in “complete control” of Chinshwehaw town on the China border and Hsenwi, which sits on the road to the China border.

The junta did not immediately respond to questions about whether it still controls the towns.

AFP was unable to reach residents in Hsenwi and in Hopang township, about 10 kilometres from Chinshwehaw.

The ethnic armed groups said the military has suffered dozens of dead and wounded since Friday although AFP was unable to confirm any casualty figures.

Myanmar’s borderlands are home to more than a dozen ethnic armed groups, some of which have fought the military for decades over autonomy and control of lucrative resources.

Some have trained and equipped newer “People’s Defence Forces” that have sprung up since the 2021 coup and the military’s bloody crackdown on dissent.

The AA, MNDAA and TNLA — which analysts say can call on at least 15,000 fighters between them — have fought sporadically with the junta since its power grab in 2021.

The military was under “unprecedented pressure to respond to the sharpest military reverses it has suffered” since the coup, Bangkok-based security analyst Anthony Davis told AFP.

Beijing maintains ties with some ethnic armed groups along its border with Myanmar, home to ethnic Chinese communities who use Chinese SIM cards and currency.

It has previously denied reports it has supplied the armed groups with weapons.

Earlier this month nearly 30 people were killed and dozens wounded in a strike on a camp for displaced people in neighbouring Kachin state.

The KIA blamed the junta for the attack.

This handout photo taken and released October 28, 2023 by the Kokang Information Network shows members of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army walking past a Myanmar military base after seizing it during clashes near Laukkaing township in Myanmar’s northern Shan state.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Heavy fighting between rebels and the Myanmar military stretched into a second day near the country’s northern border with China, armed groups said on Saturday.

Myanmar’s junta seized power in a February 2021 coup that sparked renewed fighting with powerful ethnic rebel groups in northern Shan state.

An alliance of ethnic rebel groups launched coordinated attacks on military positions across the country’s north on Friday, posing a fresh challenge to the junta as it struggles to quell resistance to its rule.

The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army said Saturday it had seized three military outposts — two located close to Mongko near the border with China.

The rebels also ambushed a group of soldiers coming from Hopang and seized military equipment.

The group did not provide details of fatalities.

The Ta’ang National Liberation Army said Saturday it had so far seized three military outposts at Namhkam and 18 soldiers were killed.

The group also said it had taken two military outposts at Lashio and netted a haul of military equipment.

The military deployed a fighter jet and helicopter gunship to Lashio, the TNLA statement said.

Overnight, there was heavy shelling for seven hours near Lashio, a local rescue worker said, adding the fighting had died down on Saturday.

Junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun told local media on Friday that rebels had attacked military positions in the Chinshwehaw, Laukkai, and Kunlong areas and some outposts were lost.

“We tried to maintain peace and stability in north Shan, but insurgents tried to destroy stability,” he said.

China’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday it was “closely following” the fighting and called on all sides to prevent the situation from escalating.

Shan state has been earmarked for a proposed billion-dollar rail link under China’s Belt and Road global infrastructure project.

Homes destroyed after air and artillery strikes in Mung Lai Hkyet displacement camp, in Laiza, Myanmar, on October 10, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP

Myanmar’s ruling junta ordered air strikes and troop reinforcements as it tried to recover lost outposts near the Chinese border from rebels, the military said.

The toppling of Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government in a 2021 coup sparked a huge backlash and the military junta is now battling opponents across swaths of the country.

The Kachin Independence Army (KIA) attacked Myanmar military positions around Muse district in northern Shan state on Thursday and near the remote town of Laiza in Kachin state on Friday.

The military was forced to retreat on Friday afternoon and ordered air strikes, as well as artillery and troop reinforcements, the junta said in a statement shortly before midnight Friday.

The KIA said Saturday that the military had counter-attacked with air strikes and ground artillery.

It added that the junta had suffered some fatalities in the latest clashes this week but did not provide a death toll.

“We seized a lot of guns and other equipment from the military,” KIA Colonel Naw Bu told AFP.

The KIA controls large parts of the Christian-majority Kachin state and has clashed with Myanmar’s military for decades.

The region has seen intense fighting since the coup, and the junta accuses the KIA of training People’s Defence Forces that have sprung up in resistance.

Muse lies on the path of a proposed $8.9 billion high-speed rail link from China’s landlocked Yunnan province to Myanmar’s west coast, a key part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The junta has been accused of carrying out multiple bloody attacks on civilians as it struggles to crush resistance to its 2021 coup.

Nearly 30 people were killed and dozens were wounded this month after a military strike on a camp for displaced people near Laiza.

Amnesty International said the deadly attack on the camp was likely the result of the Myanmar military using a large unguided aerial-delivered bomb, while the junta blamed the explosion on a store of rebel bombs.

A protester holds a poster with an image of detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a candlelight vigil to honour those who have died during demonstrations against the military coup in Yangon on March 13, 2021.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Myanmar’s junta is endangering the life of jailed democracy figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi, her political party said on Thursday, accusing the military of depriving her of medical care and food.

Suu Kyi has been detained since the generals seized power in February 2021, ending a 10-year democratic experiment and plunging the Southeast Asian country into bloody turmoil.

In recent days, local media have reported the Nobel laureate, 78, was suffering dizzy spells, vomiting and unable to eat because of a tooth infection.

“We are particularly concerned that she is not receiving adequate medical care and they are not providing healthy food nor accommodation sufficiently with the intention to risk her life,” the National League for Democracy said.

“If Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s health is not only impaired but her life also is endangered, the military junta is solely responsible,” the statement said, using a Burmese honorific.

During her 19-month trial in a junta court that rights groups denounced as a sham, Suu Kyi regularly skipped hearings on health grounds.

That trial ended last year, with Suu Kyi jailed for a total of 33 years in prison, a term later partially reduced by junta chief Min Aung Hlaing.

Suu Kyi’s UK-based son told the BBC last week that the junta was denying treatment to his mother for dizziness and a gum disease, though he is not in direct contact with her.

A junta spokesman told AFP last week that reports of Suu Kyi’s ill health were “rumours”.

“She’s not suffering from anything as her medical doctors are taking care of her health,” Zaw Min Tun said.

Suu Kyi, who remains widely popular in Myanmar, was being held as a “hostage… in secret places”, by the junta, the NLD said.

The party asked the international community to “advance efforts and push” for the release of Suu Kyi and all political prisoners in Myanmar.

According to a local monitoring group, more than 24,000 people have been arrested in the junta’s sweeping crackdown since the coup.

In June 2022, after more than a year under house arrest, Suu Kyi was moved to a prison compound in another part of the sprawling, military-built capital Naypyidaw.

There, she was no longer permitted her domestic staff of around 10 people and assigned military-chosen helpers, sources told AFP at the time.

Confinement in the isolated capital is a far cry from the years Suu Kyi spent under house arrest during a previous junta, where she became a world-famous democracy figurehead.

During that period, she lived at her family’s colonial-era lakeside mansion in commercial hub Yangon and regularly gave speeches to crowds on the other side of her garden wall.

The NLD has been decimated in the junta’s bloody crackdown on dissent, with one former lawmaker executed by the junta in the country’s first use of capital punishment in decades.

In March, the junta dissolved the party for failing to re-register under a tough new military-drafted electoral law, removing it from polls it has indicated it may hold in 2025.