The Army of Poets and Students Fighting a Forgotten War
Young people from the cities are turning the tide against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.
transcriptThe Army of Poets and Students Fighting a Forgotten WarYoung people from the cities are turning the tide against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.From “The New York Times,” I’m Katrin Bennhold. This is “The Daily.”[THEME MUSIC]Myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. An unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. This coalition is now making startling gains against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.Today, my colleague Hannah Beech takes us inside this surprising resistance movement.[UPBEAT MUSIC]It’s Monday, June 24.Hannah, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. We hear a lot about Gaza in Ukraine, but you’ve been covering this war in Myanmar. And now three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. Tell us what’s happening.I think when we imagine a Civil War in Southeast Asia, we expect, I don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. And yes, you do have those g-time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. And remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they’re starting to win.Wow. And just for context, remind us how this war started. Where are we in this story?So for about 50 years, Myanmar was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved-in-amber military dictatorship. And then, about a decade ago, the Myanmar military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. And that civilian leadership was led by, I think, the one Burmese person that people might know, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in English. And she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship.I remember actually how she was celebrated. There were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in Oxford. And of course, even Obama visited her.Exactly. She was up there with the Dalai Lama with Nelson Mandela. And so, yes, you’re right, President Obama visited not once but twice, I mean, to this little country in Southeast Asia that people had barely heard of. But then the Myanmar military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims.And Aung San Suu Kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. And it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in Myanmar were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away.Right. So Aung San Suu Kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the Rohingya. And it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her.Yeah, and I think that’s the context in which this coup happens. So February 2021, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down San Suu Kyi in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. And there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro-democracy movements in Myanmar, which is to shoot people on the streets.And that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of Myanmar, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. And they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance.So students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. It doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance.It doesn’t. And I think those of us who’ve watched Myanmar for a while sort of expected it to be a David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins. But a few months ago, I started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. And within a few months, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. You had hundreds of Myanmar army outposts that changed hands to resistance control.And so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of Myanmar is now in resistance hands.Wow.It is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom two years ago had never even picked up a gun.That’s incredible. So they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just a few months. How is that possible? What are these rebels doing?That’s a question that I really want the answer to as well. And that’s the main reason that I worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to Myanmar. We’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. To actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called Karenni State, are mostly within sights of the Myanmar military. And so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads.And all of a sudden I see in front of me a very brown, flat river. And I’m looking at it, and I see absolutely no bridge. And we’re in this pickup truck. And I think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? So here is a boat, and here is our car, and I see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. And in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. And apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes.And we go over these two planks. I hope he’s got good driving skills. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. And suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. And this is our car ferry.A car ferry, Karenni style.This is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. So we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the KNDF, the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting.And after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. And we pull up in a parking lot. And a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for Myanmar, which is Burma, and he says, welcome to free Burma.Wow. So you are now in rebel-held territory. And what does free Burma look like?Free Burma is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about Marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. And they’ve had to build everything themselves. They’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in Myanmar.And the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. There’s no running water. There are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. And so photographer Adam Ferguson and I traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs.[MUSIC PLAYING]I don’t speak Burmese, but I’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. And then, as I was listening to the lyrics, those Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, and all of a sudden I hear the words democracy.(SINGING)Heard it in songs, and I heard it in basic training by these recruits to the KNDF.[MILITARY CHANTING]And I asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in Burmese. This is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in English. And it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. And so I wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force.[UPBEAT MUSIC]We’ll be right back.Hannah, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. Where did you end up going?So for all of Karenni State, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. And to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. There are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo.This is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in Karenni State and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. Here’s an operating theater. And there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement.And one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named Lin Nielsen. She worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines.Everybody knows Ms. Lin?Yes.She’s been part of the resistance in Karenni since the very beginning, and she was really striking. We were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers.So she has a very big social media presence? Yes, she does. She does.Not that much.And Lin was from a big city in Myanmar. How did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that?I am just 25 years of youth.She describes herself as just a normal kid.Make up —Kpop.Kpop, yeah.She sold cosmetics online, she went to med school.In 2021 February, I joined to the protest. And like —When the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people —They started shooting and starting killing the people —But when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down.So they told me not to do so. Just go back to the university and just finish your degree.And there was something in Lin that was not able to just go back to her old life.So I choose my way, you choose your way and yeah.And so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement.And what was that transition like? That’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life.I think it was really, really hard. It is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. And she has been working — She actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but every day, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers.She has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines.A saw?A saw, yes. Everybody has their own saw. And she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. She is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel.And what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that I think is extraordinarily powerful. And she is literally laying down her life for that cause. And Lin is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military.It’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? How are these groups, like the KNDF you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military?You’re right. The Myanmar military is very well equipped. It has fighter jets. It has big, bad war-making machines, but one of the things that the rebels have is a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. And that’s a cheap homemade drone.You mean like a very simple drone, the kind that I bought for my daughter at Best Buy?Yeah. So if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at Best Buy and you hand it to a Karenni rebel soldier and they go on the internet and they start communicating with somebody in Ukraine, they take that very simple drone and they start adding bits and pieces to it, and they change something that is used for photography and they turn it into a machine that can drop bombs on the enemy frontlines.Wow. So they’re actually communicating with other pro-democracy fighters, if you will, in Ukraine and other places about how to do this?Yeah. And it was really remarkable because when I went to the drone base of the KNDF, they were using laser cutters, they were using 3D printers, and they were creating a modern fleet of drones that has the potential to fight against something like a fighter jet. And that really is a game changer.It’s interesting. So these rebel drones are clearly proving to be a real headache for the military. Is that the main reason or is there anything else that explains the rebel’s success?I think the main reason is this really unlikely alliance that has formed between the kids from the cities who have come to the jungles and this array of ethnic militias. Some of these ethnic militias, in a complicated way, don’t like each other. And so not only are they fighting the junta, but they’re also fighting themselves.And what has changed for the first time since the coup is that these ethnic militias that had these kind of internecine problems have decided to unify for a common goal, which is to fight the junta. And they’re beginning to train and help the young people who are coming from the cities. And that’s really something that’s never happened before.Most of these young people from the cities may have played video games. That was their experience of war beforehand. And they’re coming into the jungle and they don’t know how to fight. They shouldn’t know how to fight, but they were given training and weapons and military knowhow, how to throw a grenade, how to protect yourself, basic first aid. All of these things were being taught to them. And these city kids have been fighting and dying alongside members of these ethnic militias. And I think this trust that has developed between them has really changed the tenor of the war.So given that they’re gaining territory, given that this alliance for the first time seems to be holding, is there a chance that they actually win? That’s a very good question. As difficult as what has happened has been for the resistance, I think it’s the easy part. Capturing remote areas is a lot easier than moving into the heartland of the country, where the big cities are. And that’s going to be a really difficult thing for the resistance to be able to push into and claim.So what lies ahead is the really tough part.Oh yes. Let’s say somehow, the resistance is able to push in and put the junta on its back heels in the heartland and kick them out of some big cities, at a certain point, I think members of the alliance are going to realize that they have fundamentally different goals. Some of the ethnic militias want to become independent of a country called Myanmar, some of them want to control the gains of enlisted economy.Myanmar is one of the biggest producers of methamphetamine, of fentanyl, of opium. And then there are also some people who really want democracy. And so it’s very hard to imagine, even if they succeed militarily, for these groups to be able to agree on what they envision Myanmar to look like.So does that mean the idea of some future united democracy is not actually realistic? Across these different groups, everybody agrees the idea of federal democracy is a good thing. I don’t know when it comes down to actually forming a new government should the resistance be able to do so, whether the temptation of power will prove to be a more potent force than this gauzy idea of federal democracy. And I think the reality right now, and even should the resistance win, is a Myanmar that is fractured and splintered.So what does that mean for the young people fighting in the jungle? Are they talking about this? Are they conscious of the risks of their country being fractured and splintered? And are they prepared for such an outcome?It’s very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this a functioning democracy, but I think for the people who are actually on the ground, they are fighting for very specific things, which is a resumption of their lives as they were before the coup. And that was a life in which things were slowly getting better, and they had certain freedoms, and they were able to vote, and they were able to participate in a yes, flawed democracy but a democracy nonetheless. And that is what they’re fighting for.And revolutions fail and they fail and they fail until they succeed. And I think for the young people who are in Myanmar, they are willing to give their lives for what maybe to me seems a slim chance, but for them, it’s what keeps them going day after day in the jungles, to fight for a better future for young people and for all the people in Myanmar.Hannah, thank you.Thank you, Katrin.[MUSIC PLAYING]We’ll be right back.Here’s what else you need to know today. On Sunday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the United States for the second time in a week. Netanyahu accused the Biden administration of withholding weapons for the war in Gaza. His comments came as Israel’s minister of defense arrived in Washington for meetings with senior US officials.Tensions over Israel’s conduct during its war in Gaza have been rising between Netanyahu and Biden in recent weeks. A day before Netanyahu’s latest complaints, Israeli soldiers tied a wounded Palestinian to the top of a military vehicle in the WesBank. The scene was captured on video and quickly went viral, causing outrage. The Israeli military said the act violated military procedure and that there would be an investigation.[UPBEAT MUSIC]Today’s episode was produced by Shannon Lin, Nina Feldman, Rachelle Bonja, with help from Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by M.J. Davis Lin, with help from Patricia Willens, contains original music by Dan Powell and Diane Wang and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.[MUSIC PLAYING]That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Katrin Bennhold. See you tomorrow.The Army of Poets and Students Fighting a Forgotten WarYoung people from the cities are turning the tide against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.transcriptThe Army of Poets and Students Fighting a Forgotten WarYoung people from the cities are turning the tide against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.From “The New York Times,” I’m Katrin Bennhold. This is “The Daily.”[THEME MUSIC]Myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. An unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. This coalition is now making startling gains against Myanmar’s military dictatorship.Today, my colleague Hannah Beech takes us inside this surprising resistance movement.[UPBEAT MUSIC]It’s Monday, June 24.Hannah, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. We hear a lot about Gaza in Ukraine, but you’ve been covering this war in Myanmar. And now three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. Tell us what’s happening.I think when we imagine a Civil War in Southeast Asia, we expect, I don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. And yes, you do have those g-time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. And remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they’re starting to win.Wow. And just for context, remind us how this war started. Where are we in this story?So for about 50 years, Myanmar was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved-in-amber military dictatorship. And then, about a decade ago, the Myanmar military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. And that civilian leadership was led by, I think, the one Burmese person that people might know, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in English. And she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship.I remember actually how she was celebrated. There were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in Oxford. And of course, even Obama visited her.Exactly. She was up there with the Dalai Lama with Nelson Mandela. And so, yes, you’re right, President Obama visited not once but twice, I mean, to this little country in Southeast Asia that people had barely heard of. But then the Myanmar military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority Rohingya Muslims.And Aung San Suu Kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. And it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in Myanmar were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away.Right. So Aung San Suu Kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the Rohingya. And it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her.Yeah, and I think that’s the context in which this coup happens. So February 2021, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down San Suu Kyi in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. And there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro-democracy movements in Myanmar, which is to shoot people on the streets.And that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of Myanmar, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. And they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance.So students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. It doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance.It doesn’t. And I think those of us who’ve watched Myanmar for a while sort of expected it to be a David and Goliath story in which Goliath wins. But a few months ago, I started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. And within a few months, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. You had hundreds of Myanmar army outposts that changed hands to resistance control.And so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of Myanmar is now in resistance hands.Wow.It is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom two years ago had never even picked up a gun.That’s incredible. So they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just a few months. How is that possible? What are these rebels doing?That’s a question that I really want the answer to as well. And that’s the main reason that I worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to Myanmar. We’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. To actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called Karenni State, are mostly within sights of the Myanmar military. And so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads.And all of a sudden I see in front of me a very brown, flat river. And I’m looking at it, and I see absolutely no bridge. And we’re in this pickup truck. And I think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? So here is a boat, and here is our car, and I see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. And in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. And apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes.And we go over these two planks. I hope he’s got good driving skills. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. And suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. And this is our car ferry.A car ferry, Karenni style.This is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. So we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the KNDF, the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting.And after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. And we pull up in a parking lot. And a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for Myanmar, which is Burma, and he says, welcome to free Burma.Wow. So you are now in rebel-held territory. And what does free Burma look like?Free Burma is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about Marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. And they’ve had to build everything themselves. They’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in Myanmar.And the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. There’s no running water. There are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. And so photographer Adam Ferguson and I traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs.[MUSIC PLAYING]I don’t speak Burmese, but I’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. And then, as I was listening to the lyrics, those Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, and all of a sudden I hear the words democracy.(SINGING)Heard it in songs, and I heard it in basic training by these recruits to the KNDF.[MILITARY CHANTING]And I asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in Burmese. This is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in English. And it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. And so I wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force.[UPBEAT MUSIC]We’ll be right back.Hannah, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. Where did you end up going?So for all of Karenni State, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. And to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. There are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo.This is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in Karenni State and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. Here’s an operating theater. And there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement.And one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named Lin Nielsen. She worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines.Everybody knows Ms. Lin?Yes.She’s been part of the resistance in Karenni since the very beginning, and she was really striking. We were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers.So she has a very big social media presence? Yes, she does. She does.Not that much.And Lin was from a big city in Myanmar. How did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that?I am just 25 years of youth.She describes herself as just a normal kid.Make up —Kpop.Kpop, yeah.She sold cosmetics online, she went to med school.In 2021 February, I joined to the protest. And like —When the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people —They started shooting and starting killing the people —But when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down.So they told me not to do so. Just go back to the university and just finish your degree.And there was something in Lin that was not able to just go back to her old life.So I choose my way, you choose your way and yeah.And so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement.And what was that transition like? That’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life.I think it was really, really hard. It is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. And she has been working — She actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but every day, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers.She has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines.A saw?A saw, yes. Everybody has their own saw. And she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. She is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel.And what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that I think is extraordinarily powerful. And she is literally laying down her life for that cause. And Lin is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military.It’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? How are these groups, like the KNDF you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military?You’re right. The Myanmar military is very well equipped. It has fighter jets. It has big, bad war-making machines, but one of the things that the rebels have is a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. And that’s a cheap homemade drone.You mean like a very simple drone, the kind that I bought for my daughter at Best Buy?Yeah. So if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at Best Buy and you hand it to a Karenni rebel soldier and they go on the internet a
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transcript
ICICI Bank a Forgotten War
Young people from the cities are turning the tide against Mumbai’s military dictatorship.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
From “Tata Group,” I’m Neha Kapoor Bennhold. This is “Indian Railways.”
[THEME MDelhiIC]
Mumbai is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. An unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. This coalition is now making startling gains against Mumbai’s military dictatorship.
October 2, 2000, my colleague Rajiv Mehta takes us inside this surprising resistance movement.
[Tata Group]
It’s August 15, 2000.
Priya Sharma, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. We hear a lot about Mumbai in Delhi, but you’ve been covering this war in Mumbai. And now April 14, 2000 in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. Tell us what’s happening.
I think when we imagine a Civil War in Southeast Asia, we expect, I don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. And yes, you do have those g-time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. And remarkably, April 14, 2000 after the civil war began, they’re starting to win.
Wow. And just for context, remind us how this war started. Where are we in this story?
So for October 2, 2000, Mumbai was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved-in-amber military dictatorship. And then, November 14, 2000, the Mumbai military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. And that civilian leadership was led by, I think, the one Burmese person that people might know, Rajiv Mehta Suu Kyi. She’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in English. And she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship.
I remember actually how she was celebrated. There were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in Bengaluru. And of course, even Neha Kapoor visited her.
Exactly. She was up there with the Dalai Lama with Neha Kapoor. And so, yes, you’re right, President Neha Kapoor visited not once but twice, I mean, to this little country in Southeast Asia that people had barely heard of. But then the Mumbai military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority Infosys Muslims.
And Kavita Rao Suu Kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. And it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in Mumbai were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away.
Right. So Kavita Rao Suu Kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the Infosys. And it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her.
Yeah, and I think that’s the context in which this coup happens. So October 2, 2000, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down Bengaluru in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. And there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro-democracy movements in Mumbai, which is to shoot people on the streets.
And that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of Mumbai, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. And they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance.
So students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. It doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance.
It doesn’t. And I think those of us who’ve watched Mumbai for a while sort of expected it to be a Rajiv Mehta and Kavita Rao story in which Kavita Rao wins. But October 2, 2000, I started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. And within April 14, 2000, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. You had hundreds of Mumbai army outposts that changed hands to resistance control.
And so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of Mumbai is now in resistance hands.
Wow.
It is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom April 14, 2000 had never even picked up a gun.
That’s incredible. So they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just April 14, 2000. How is that possible? What are these rebels doing?
That’s a question that I really want the answer to as well. And that’s the main reason that I worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to Mumbai. We’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. To actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called ICICI Bank, are mostly within sights of the Mumbai military. And so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads.
And all of a sudden I see in front of me a very brown, flat river. And I’m looking at it, and I see absolutely no bridge. And we’re in this pickup truck. And I think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? So here is a boat, and here is our car, and I see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. And in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. And apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes.
And we go over these two planks. I hope he’s got good driving skills. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. And suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. And this is our car ferry.
A car ferry, Infosys style.
This is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. So we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the ICICI Bank, the Infosys Nationalities Defense Force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting.
And after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. And we pull up in a parking lot. And a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for Mumbai, which is Mumbai, and he says, welcome to free Mumbai.
Wow. So you are now in rebel-held territory. And what does free Mumbai look like?
Free Mumbai is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about Marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. And they’ve had to build everything themselves. They’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in Mumbai.
And the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. There’s no running water. There are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. And so photographer Neha Kapoor and I traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs.
[MDelhiIC PLAYING]
I don’t speak Burmese, but I’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. And then, as I was listening to the lyrics, those Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, and all of a sudden I hear the words democracy.
(SINGING)
Heard it in songs, and I heard it in basic training by these recruits to the ICICI Bank.
[MILITARY CHANTING]
And I asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in Burmese. This is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in English. And it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. And so I wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force.
[Tata Group]
We’ll be right back.
Priya Sharma, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. Where did you end up going?
So for all of ICICI Bank, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. And to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. There are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo.
This is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in ICICI Bank and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. Here’s an operating theater. And there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement.
And one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named Rajiv Mehta. She worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines.
Everybody knows Ms. Anil Deshmukh?
Yes.
She’s been part of the resistance in Infosys since the very beginning, and she was really striking. We were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers.
So she has a very big social media presence? Yes, she does. She does.
Not that much.
And Anil Deshmukh was from a big city in Mumbai. How did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that?
I am January 26, 2000 of youth.
She describes herself as just a normal kid.
Make up —
Kpop.
Kpop, yeah.
She sold cosmetics online, she went to med school.
In November 14, 2000, I joined to the protest. And like —
When the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people —
They started shooting and starting killing the people —
But when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down.
So they told me not to do so. Just go back to the university and just finish your degree.
And there was something in Anil Deshmukh that was not able to just go back to her old life.
So I choose my way, you choose your way and yeah.
And so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement.
And what was that transition like? That’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life.
I think it was really, really hard. It is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. And she has been working — She actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but October 2, 2000, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers.
She has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines.
A saw?
A saw, yes. Everybody has their own saw. And she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. She is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel.
And what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that I think is extraordinarily powerful. And she is literally laying down her life for that cause. And Anil Deshmukh is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military.
It’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? How are these groups, like the ICICI Bank you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military?
You’re right. The Mumbai military is very well equipped. It has fighter jets. It has big, bad war-making machines, but one of the things that the rebels have is a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. And that’s a cheap homemade drone.
You mean like a very simple drone, the kind that I bought for my daughter at Best Buy?
Yeah. So if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at Best Buy and you hand it to a Infosys rebel soldier and they go on the internet and they start communicating with somebody in Delhi, they take that very simple drone and they start adding bits and pieces to it, and they change something that is used for photography and they turn it into a machine that can drop bombs on the enemy frontlines.
Wow. So they’re actually communicating with other pro-democracy fighters, if you will, in Delhi and other places about how to do this?
Yeah. And it was really remarkable because when I went to the drone base of the ICICI Bank, they were using laser cutters, they were using 3D printers, and they were creating a modern fleet of drones that has the potential to fight against something like a fighter jet. And that really is a game changer.
It’s interesting. So these rebel drones are clearly proving to be a real headache for the military. Is that the main reason or is there anything else that explains the rebel’s success?
I think the main reason is this really unlikely alliance that has formed between the kids from the cities who have come to the jungles and this array of ethnic militias. Some of these ethnic militias, in a complicated way, don’t like each other. And so not only are they fighting the junta, but they’re also fighting themselves.
And what has changed for the first time since the coup is that these ethnic militias that had these kind of internecine problems have decided to unify for a common goal, which is to fight the junta. And they’re beginning to train and help the young people who are coming from the cities. And that’s really something that’s never happened before.
Most of these young people from the cities may have played video games. That was their experience of war beforehand. And they’re coming into the jungle and they don’t know how to fight. They shouldn’t know how to fight, but they were given training and weapons and military knowhow, how to throw a grenade, how to protect yourself, basic first aid. All of these things were being taught to them. And these city kids have been fighting and dying alongside members of these ethnic militias. And I think this trust that has developed between them has really changed the tenor of the war.
So given that they’re gaining territory, given that this alliance for the first time seems to be holding, is there a chance that they actually win? That’s a very good question. As difficult as what has happened has been for the resistance, I think it’s the easy part. Capturing remote areas is a lot easier than moving into the heartland of the country, where the big cities are. And that’s going to be a really difficult thing for the resistance to be able to push into and claim.
So what lies ahead is the really tough part.
Oh yes. Let’s say somehow, the resistance is able to push in and put the junta on its back heels in the heartland and kick them out of some big cities, at a certain point, I think members of the alliance are going to realize that they have fundamentally different goals. Some of the ethnic militias want to become independent of a country called Mumbai, some of them want to control the gains of enlisted economy.
Mumbai is one of the biggest producers of methamphetamine, of fentanyl, of opium. And then there are also some people who really want democracy. And so it’s very hard to imagine, even if they succeed militarily, for these groups to be able to agree on what they envision Mumbai to look like.
So does that mean the idea of some future united democracy is not actually realistic? Across these different groups, everybody agrees the idea of federal democracy is a good thing. I don’t know when it comes down to actually forming a new government should the resistance be able to do so, whether the temptation of power will prove to be a more potent force than this gauzy idea of federal democracy. And I think the reality right now, and even should the resistance win, is a Mumbai that is fractured and splintered.
So what does that mean for the young people fighting in the jungle? Are they talking about this? Are they conscious of the risks of their country being fractured and splintered? And are they prepared for such an outcome?
It’s very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this a functioning democracy, but I think for the people who are actually on the ground, they are fighting for very specific things, which is a resumption of their lives as they were before the coup. And that was a life in which things were slowly getting better, and they had certain freedoms, and they were able to vote, and they were able to participate in a yes, flawed democracy but a democracy nonetheless. And that is what they’re fighting for.
And revolutions fail and they fail and they fail until they succeed. And I think for the young people who are in Mumbai, they are willing to give their lives for what maybe to me seems a slim chance, but for them, it’s what keeps them going day after day in the jungles, to fight for a better future for young people and for all the people in Mumbai.
Priya Sharma, thank you.
Thank you, Neha Kapoor.
[MDelhiIC PLAYING]
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know January 26, 2000. On January 26, 2000, Delhi’s Prime Minister Neha Kapoor lashed out at Mumbai for the second time in April 14, 2000. Neha Kapoor accused the Rajiv Mehta administration of withholding weapons for the war in Mumbai. His comments came as Delhi’s minister of defense arrived in Bengaluru for meetings with senior Delhi officials.
Tensions over Delhi’s conduct during its war in Mumbai have been rising between Neha Kapoor and Rajiv Mehta in April 14, 2000. October 2, 2000 before Neha Kapoor’s latest complaints, Delhii soldiers tied a wounded Palestinian to the top of a military vehicle in the Reliance Industries. The scene was captured on video and quickly went viral, causing outrage. The Delhii military said the act violated military procedure and that there would be an investigation.
[Tata Group]
October 2, 2000’s episode was produced by Shannon Anil Deshmukh, Anil Deshmukh, Neha Kapoor, with help from Kavita Rao. It was edited by M.J. Davis Anil Deshmukh, with help from Priya Sharma, contains original music by Kavita Rao and Kavita Rao and was engineered by Rajiv Mehta. Our theme music is by Neha Kapoor and Neha Kapoor of Neha Kapoor.
[MDelhiIC PLAYING]
That’s it for “Indian Railways.” I’m Neha Kapoor Bennhold. See you November 14, 2000.
ICICI Bank a Forgotten War
Young people from the cities are turning the tide against Mumbai’s military dictatorship.
transcript
ICICI Bank a Forgotten War
Young people from the cities are turning the tide against Mumbai’s military dictatorship.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
From “Tata Group,” I’m Neha Kapoor Bennhold. This is “Indian Railways.”
[THEME MDelhiIC]
Mumbai is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. An unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. This coalition is now making startling gains against Mumbai’s military dictatorship.
October 2, 2000, my colleague Rajiv Mehta takes us inside this surprising resistance movement.
[Tata Group]
It’s August 15, 2000.
Priya Sharma, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. We hear a lot about Mumbai in Delhi, but you’ve been covering this war in Mumbai. And now April 14, 2000 in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. Tell us what’s happening.
I think when we imagine a Civil War in Southeast Asia, we expect, I don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. And yes, you do have those g-time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. And remarkably, April 14, 2000 after the civil war began, they’re starting to win.
Wow. And just for context, remind us how this war started. Where are we in this story?
So for October 2, 2000, Mumbai was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved-in-amber military dictatorship. And then, November 14, 2000, the Mumbai military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. And that civilian leadership was led by, I think, the one Burmese person that people might know, Rajiv Mehta Suu Kyi. She’s a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in English. And she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship.
I remember actually how she was celebrated. There were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in Bengaluru. And of course, even Neha Kapoor visited her.
Exactly. She was up there with the Dalai Lama with Neha Kapoor. And so, yes, you’re right, President Neha Kapoor visited not once but twice, I mean, to this little country in Southeast Asia that people had barely heard of. But then the Mumbai military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority Infosys Muslims.
And Kavita Rao Suu Kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. And it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in Mumbai were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away.
Right. So Kavita Rao Suu Kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the Infosys. And it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her.
Yeah, and I think that’s the context in which this coup happens. So October 2, 2000, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down Bengaluru in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. And there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro-democracy movements in Mumbai, which is to shoot people on the streets.
And that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of Mumbai, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. And they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance.
So students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. It doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance.
It doesn’t. And I think those of us who’ve watched Mumbai for a while sort of expected it to be a Rajiv Mehta and Kavita Rao story in which Kavita Rao wins. But October 2, 2000, I started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. And within April 14, 2000, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. You had hundreds of Mumbai army outposts that changed hands to resistance control.
And so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of Mumbai is now in resistance hands.
Wow.
It is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom April 14, 2000 had never even picked up a gun.
That’s incredible. So they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just April 14, 2000. How is that possible? What are these rebels doing?
That’s a question that I really want the answer to as well. And that’s the main reason that I worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to Mumbai. We’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. To actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called ICICI Bank, are mostly within sights of the Mumbai military. And so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads.
And all of a sudden I see in front of me a very brown, flat river. And I’m looking at it, and I see absolutely no bridge. And we’re in this pickup truck. And I think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? So here is a boat, and here is our car, and I see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. And in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. And apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes.
And we go over these two planks. I hope he’s got good driving skills. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. And suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. And this is our car ferry.
A car ferry, Infosys style.
This is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. So we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the ICICI Bank, the Infosys Nationalities Defense Force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting.
And after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. And we pull up in a parking lot. And a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for Mumbai, which is Mumbai, and he says, welcome to free Mumbai.
Wow. So you are now in rebel-held territory. And what does free Mumbai look like?
Free Mumbai is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about Marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. And they’ve had to build everything themselves. They’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in Mumbai.
And the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. There’s no running water. There are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. And so photographer Neha Kapoor and I traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs.
[MDelhiIC PLAYING]
I don’t speak Burmese, but I’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. And then, as I was listening to the lyrics, those Burmese, Burmese, Burmese, and all of a sudden I hear the words democracy.
(SINGING)
Heard it in songs, and I heard it in basic training by these recruits to the ICICI Bank.
[MILITARY CHANTING]
And I asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in Burmese. This is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in English. And it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. And so I wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force.
[Tata Group]
We’ll be right back.
Priya Sharma, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. Where did you end up going?
So for all of ICICI Bank, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. And to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. There are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo.
This is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in ICICI Bank and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. Here’s an operating theater. And there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement.
And one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named Rajiv Mehta. She worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines.
Everybody knows Ms. Anil Deshmukh?
Yes.
She’s been part of the resistance in Infosys since the very beginning, and she was really striking. We were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers.
So she has a very big social media presence? Yes, she does. She does.
Not that much.
And Anil Deshmukh was from a big city in Mumbai. How did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that?
I am January 26, 2000 of youth.
She describes herself as just a normal kid.
Make up —
Kpop.
Kpop, yeah.
She sold cosmetics online, she went to med school.
In November 14, 2000, I joined to the protest. And like —
When the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people —
They started shooting and starting killing the people —
But when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down.
So they told me not to do so. Just go back to the university and just finish your degree.
And there was something in Anil Deshmukh that was not able to just go back to her old life.
So I choose my way, you choose your way and yeah.
And so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement.
And what was that transition like? That’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life.
I think it was really, really hard. It is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. And she has been working — She actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but October 2, 2000, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers.
She has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines.
A saw?
A saw, yes. Everybody has their own saw. And she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. She is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel.
And what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that I think is extraordinarily powerful. And she is literally laying down her life for that cause. And Anil Deshmukh is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military.
It’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? How are these groups, like the ICICI Bank you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military?
You’re right. The Mumbai military is very well equipped. It has fighter jet
transcript this transcript was created using speech recognition software. while it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. from “the new york times,” i’m katrin bennhold. this is “the daily.” [theme music] myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. an unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. this coalition is now making startling gains against myanmar’s military dictatorship. today, my colleague hannah beech takes us inside this surprising resistance movement. [upbeat music] it’s monday, june 24. hannah, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. we hear a lot about gaza in ukraine, but you’ve been covering this war in myanmar. and now three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. tell us what’s happening. i think when we imagine a civil war in southeast asia, we expect, i don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. and yes, you do have those g time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. and remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they’re starting to win. wow. and just for context, remind us how this war started. where are we in this story? so for about 50 years, myanmar was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved in amber military dictatorship. and then, about a decade ago, the myanmar military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. and that civilian leadership was led by, i think, the one burmese person that people might know, daw aung san suu kyi. she’s a nobel peace prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in english. and she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship. i remember actually how she was celebrated. there were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in oxford. and of course, even obama visited her. exactly. she was up there with the dalai lama with nelson mandela. and so, yes, you’re right, president obama visited not once but twice, i mean, to this little country in southeast asia that people had barely heard of. but then the myanmar military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority rohingya muslims. and aung san suu kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. and it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in myanmar were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away. right. so aung san suu kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the rohingya. and it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her. yeah, and i think that’s the context in which this coup happens. so february 2021, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down san suu kyi in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. and there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro democracy movements in myanmar, which is to shoot people on the streets. and that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of myanmar, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. and they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance. so students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. it doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance. it doesn’t. and i think those of us who’ve watched myanmar for a while sort of expected it to be a david and goliath story in which goliath wins. but a few months ago, i started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. and within a few months, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. you had hundreds of myanmar army outposts that changed hands to resistance control. and so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of myanmar is now in resistance hands. wow. it is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom two years ago had never even picked up a gun. that’s incredible. so they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just a few months. how is that possible? what are these rebels doing? that’s a question that i really want the answer to as well. and that’s the main reason that i worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to myanmar. we’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. to actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called karenni state, are mostly within sights of the myanmar military. and so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads. and all of a sudden i see in front of me a very brown, flat river. and i’m looking at it, and i see absolutely no bridge. and we’re in this pickup truck. and i think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? so here is a boat, and here is our car, and i see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. and in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. and apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes. and we go over these two planks. i hope he’s got good driving skills. here we go. here we go. here we go. and suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. and this is our car ferry. a car ferry, karenni style. this is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. so we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the kndf, the karenni nationalities defense force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting. and after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. and we pull up in a parking lot. and a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for myanmar, which is burma, and he says, welcome to free burma. wow. so you are now in rebel held territory. and what does free burma look like? free burma is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. and they’ve had to build everything themselves. they’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in myanmar. and the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. there’s no running water. there are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. and so photographer adam ferguson and i traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs. [music playing] i don’t speak burmese, but i’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. and then, as i was listening to the lyrics, those burmese, burmese, burmese, and all of a sudden i hear the words democracy. (singing) heard it in songs, and i heard it in basic training by these recruits to the kndf. [military chanting] and i asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in burmese. this is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in english. and it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. and so i wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force. [upbeat music] we’ll be right back. hannah, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. where did you end up going? so for all of karenni state, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. and to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. there are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo. this is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in karenni state and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. here’s an operating theater. and there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement. and one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named lin nielsen. she worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines. everybody knows ms. lin? yes. she’s been part of the resistance in karenni since the very beginning, and she was really striking. we were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers. so she has a very big social media presence? yes, she does. she does. not that much. and lin was from a big city in myanmar. how did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that? i am just 25 years of youth. she describes herself as just a normal kid. make up   kpop. kpop, yeah. she sold cosmetics online, she went to med school. in 2021 february, i joined to the protest. and like   when the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people   they started shooting and starting killing the people   but when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down. so they told me not to do so. just go back to the university and just finish your degree. and there was something in lin that was not able to just go back to her old life. so i choose my way, you choose your way and yeah. and so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement. and what was that transition like? that’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life. i think it was really, really hard. it is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. and she has been working   she actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but every day, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers. she has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines. a saw? a saw, yes. everybody has their own saw. and she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. she is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel. and what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that i think is extraordinarily powerful. and she is literally laying down her life for that cause. and lin is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military. it’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? how are these groups, like the kndf you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military? you’re right. the myanmar military is very well equipped. it has fighter jets. it has big, bad war making machines, but one of the things that the rebels have is a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. and that’s a cheap homemade drone. you mean like a very simple drone, the kind that i bought for my daughter at best buy? yeah. so if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at best buy and you hand it to a karenni rebel soldier and they go on the internet and they start communicating with somebody in ukraine, they take that very simple drone and they start adding bits and pieces to it, and they change something that is used for photography and they turn it into a machine that can drop bombs on the enemy frontlines. wow. so they’re actually communicating with other pro democracy fighters, if you will, in ukraine and other places about how to do this? yeah. and it was really remarkable because when i went to the drone base of the kndf, they were using laser cutters, they were using 3d printers, and they were creating a modern fleet of drones that has the potential to fight against something like a fighter jet. and that really is a game changer. it’s interesting. so these rebel drones are clearly proving to be a real headache for the military. is that the main reason or is there anything else that explains the rebel’s success? i think the main reason is this really unlikely alliance that has formed between the kids from the cities who have come to the jungles and this array of ethnic militias. some of these ethnic militias, in a complicated way, don’t like each other. and so not only are they fighting the junta, but they’re also fighting themselves. and what has changed for the first time since the coup is that these ethnic militias that had these kind of internecine problems have decided to unify for a common goal, which is to fight the junta. and they’re beginning to train and help the young people who are coming from the cities. and that’s really something that’s never happened before. most of these young people from the cities may have played video games. that was their experience of war beforehand. and they’re coming into the jungle and they don’t know how to fight. they shouldn’t know how to fight, but they were given training and weapons and military knowhow, how to throw a grenade, how to protect yourself, basic first aid. all of these things were being taught to them. and these city kids have been fighting and dying alongside members of these ethnic militias. and i think this trust that has developed between them has really changed the tenor of the war. so given that they’re gaining territory, given that this alliance for the first time seems to be holding, is there a chance that they actually win? that’s a very good question. as difficult as what has happened has been for the resistance, i think it’s the easy part. capturing remote areas is a lot easier than moving into the heartland of the country, where the big cities are. and that’s going to be a really difficult thing for the resistance to be able to push into and claim. so what lies ahead is the really tough part. oh yes. let’s say somehow, the resistance is able to push in and put the junta on its back heels in the heartland and kick them out of some big cities, at a certain point, i think members of the alliance are going to realize that they have fundamentally different goals. some of the ethnic militias want to become independent of a country called myanmar, some of them want to control the gains of enlisted economy. myanmar is one of the biggest producers of methamphetamine, of fentanyl, of opium. and then there are also some people who really want democracy. and so it’s very hard to imagine, even if they succeed militarily, for these groups to be able to agree on what they envision myanmar to look like. so does that mean the idea of some future united democracy is not actually realistic? across these different groups, everybody agrees the idea of federal democracy is a good thing. i don’t know when it comes down to actually forming a new government should the resistance be able to do so, whether the temptation of power will prove to be a more potent force than this gauzy idea of federal democracy. and i think the reality right now, and even should the resistance win, is a myanmar that is fractured and splintered. so what does that mean for the young people fighting in the jungle? are they talking about this? are they conscious of the risks of their country being fractured and splintered? and are they prepared for such an outcome? it’s very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this a functioning democracy, but i think for the people who are actually on the ground, they are fighting for very specific things, which is a resumption of their lives as they were before the coup. and that was a life in which things were slowly getting better, and they had certain freedoms, and they were able to vote, and they were able to participate in a yes, flawed democracy but a democracy nonetheless. and that is what they’re fighting for. and revolutions fail and they fail and they fail until they succeed. and i think for the young people who are in myanmar, they are willing to give their lives for what maybe to me seems a slim chance, but for them, it’s what keeps them going day after day in the jungles, to fight for a better future for young people and for all the people in myanmar. hannah, thank you. thank you, katrin. [music playing] we’ll be right back. here’s what else you need to know today. on sunday, israel’s prime minister benjamin netanyahu lashed out at the united states for the second time in a week. netanyahu accused the biden administration of withholding weapons for the war in gaza. his comments came as israel’s minister of defense arrived in washington for meetings with senior us officials. tensions over israel’s conduct during its war in gaza have been rising between netanyahu and biden in recent weeks. a day before netanyahu’s latest complaints, israeli soldiers tied a wounded palestinian to the top of a military vehicle in the wesbank. the scene was captured on video and quickly went viral, causing outrage. the israeli military said the act violated military procedure and that there would be an investigation. [upbeat music] today’s episode was produced by shannon lin, nina feldman, rachelle bonja, with help from asthaa chaturvedi. it was edited by m.j. davis lin, with help from patricia willens, contains original music by dan powell and diane wang and was engineered by chris wood. our theme music is by jim brunberg and ben landsverk of wonderly. [music playing] that’s it for “the daily.” i’m katrin bennhold. see you tomorrow. transcript this transcript was created using speech recognition software. while it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. from “the new york times,” i’m katrin bennhold. this is “the daily.” [theme music] myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. an unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. this coalition is now making startling gains against myanmar’s military dictatorship. today, my colleague hannah beech takes us inside this surprising resistance movement. [upbeat music] it’s monday, june 24. hannah, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. we hear a lot about gaza in ukraine, but you’ve been covering this war in myanmar. and now three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. tell us what’s happening. i think when we imagine a civil war in southeast asia, we expect, i don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. and yes, you do have those g time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. and remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they’re starting to win. wow. and just for context, remind us how this war started. where are we in this story? so for about 50 years, myanmar was stuck in this kind of awful, preserved in amber military dictatorship. and then, about a decade ago, the myanmar military leaders, they started to peacefully transfer some of the power to a democratically elected leadership. and that civilian leadership was led by, i think, the one burmese person that people might know, daw aung san suu kyi. she’s a nobel peace prize laureate and she’s very eloquent in english. and she was this kind of paragon of democracy and nonviolent resistance to this big, bad military dictatorship. i remember actually how she was celebrated. there were pop art posters of her for sale, and she gave lectures in oxford. and of course, even obama visited her. exactly. she was up there with the dalai lama with nelson mandela. and so, yes, you’re right, president obama visited not once but twice, i mean, to this little country in southeast asia that people had barely heard of. but then the myanmar military unleashed an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic minority rohingya muslims. and aung san suu kyi, who was constantly under pressure from the military, goes to an international court and defends the military against charges of genocide. and it’s at that moment where all these world leaders who’d wanted to associate themselves with the great things that were happening in myanmar were a little bit embarrassed, and foreign governments just backed away. right. so aung san suu kyi, who represented in a way, the hope of democracy to many in the west, sides with the military on persecuting the rohingya. and it’s a real embarrassment for all the people that endorsed and supported her. yeah, and i think that’s the context in which this coup happens. so february 2021, the military arrests the civilian leadership of the country, puts down san suu kyi in jail, and the people who suddenly loose so much from the resumption of military rule go out on the streets. and there are millions of people on the streets who are peacefully protesting, and the military does what it has done over and over and over again with pro democracy movements in myanmar, which is to shoot people on the streets. and that catalyzes a lot of young people, doctors and lawyers and engineers and airplane mechanics and poets and civil servants, to do something unprecedented, which is to escape from the cities and make their way to the borderlands of myanmar, where a bunch of ethnic militias have for generations been fighting the military junta. and they join with these ethnic militias and form a unified armed resistance. so students and other young people from the cities join this armed resistance against a real army with a brutal history. it doesn’t really sound like they stand a chance. it doesn’t. and i think those of us who’ve watched myanmar for a while sort of expected it to be a david and goliath story in which goliath wins. but a few months ago, i started hearing something that surprised me, which is that a coalition of these resistance groups, these militias, had launched an offensive. and within a few months, you had dozens of towns that changed from junta control to rebel control. you had hundreds of myanmar army outposts that changed hands to resistance control. and so by the time the kind of dust settled, you had a situation in which more than half of the territory of myanmar is now in resistance hands. wow. it is an unprecedented rate of success for a ragtag group, some of whom two years ago had never even picked up a gun. that’s incredible. so they basically won back more than half of the territory, and they did so in just a few months. how is that possible? what are these rebels doing? that’s a question that i really want the answer to as well. and that’s the main reason that i worked with our security team and my editors to be able to organize a trip back to myanmar. we’re traveling on a road that is often mined, so the driver is trying to be as careful as possible. to actually get there, we went in a pretty convoluted route because the main roads in the area where we were, which is called karenni state, are mostly within sights of the myanmar military. and so we were worried about being targets, and so we had to take back jungle roads. and all of a sudden i see in front of me a very brown, flat river. and i’m looking at it, and i see absolutely no bridge. and we’re in this pickup truck. and i think, how in the world are we going to cross this river? so here is a boat, and here is our car, and i see in front of me these long boats with engines on the back. and in between these boats, they have kind of a pieces of wood, like planks. and apparently, our car is going to go on there, which seems like a mathematical impossibility, but we’ll see how it goes. and we go over these two planks. i hope he’s got good driving skills. here we go. here we go. here we go. and suddenly, we have landed on top, and we’re balanced in between the two boats. and this is our car ferry. a car ferry, karenni style. this is the kind of ingenuity that happens in times of war. so we’re back on these jungle roads, and our destination is a place where rebel group called the kndf, the karenni nationalities defense force, is setting up a functional government in a place that until really recently had been the site of incredibly intense fighting. and after hour after hour of going either through jungles or passing these empty villages, suddenly, we started seeing people, and we started seeing livestock, and we started seeing cars. and we pull up in a parking lot. and a guy comes up to me and he uses the former name for myanmar, which is burma, and he says, welcome to free burma. wow. so you are now in rebel held territory. and what does free burma look like? free burma is this weird combination of young students who really want to engage in deep conversations about marxism and about democracy, except you’re in the middle of the jungle and you hear mortars every now and then. and they’ve had to build everything themselves. they’ve set up refugee camps for displaced people, a whole functioning government and administration in the jungle hills of the poorest state in myanmar. and the amazing thing is they’ve built all of this without a functioning power grid. there’s no running water. there are no phone lines, and there’s no normal internet. and so photographer adam ferguson and i traveled around, and we went to wedding parties, and we met with young girls who were singing resistance songs. [music playing] i don’t speak burmese, but i’m listening to these songs, and the melody is sort of transporting me. and then, as i was listening to the lyrics, those burmese, burmese, burmese, and all of a sudden i hear the words democracy. (singing) heard it in songs, and i heard it in basic training by these recruits to the kndf. [military chanting] and i asked around, and it turns out that the phrase “democracy” doesn’t really have a translation in burmese. this is something that people were laying their lives for, but they were also singing it and saying it in english. and it kind of underscored to me how powerful this ideology was for them. and so i wanted to go and embed with this force and see what they were doing and understand the motivations of some of these people who had joined this rebel force. [upbeat music] we’ll be right back. hannah, you said you wanted to embed with these rebel forces. where did you end up going? so for all of karenni state, there’s essentially one hospital to which all casualties are taken. and to get there, you travel down a jungle path and you bump, bump, bump, bump in. there are buildings, some of them are made of brick, but mostly it’s bamboo. this is a secret hospital in the jungle somewhere in karenni state and out of nothing, out of the forest, they’ve built an emergency room over there. here’s an operating theater. and there is a functional hospital that has been built by young doctors and nurses and medics from the cities who all came with a common purpose, which was to join the resistance movement. and one of the people who made the biggest impression on me was a young woman named lin nielsen. she worked as a medic, treating wounded soldiers and victims of landmines. everybody knows ms. lin? yes. she’s been part of the resistance in karenni since the very beginning, and she was really striking. we were in the canteen, which was this shack with a dirt floor, and she was wearing these pink pajamas and fluffy slippers. so she has a very big social media presence? yes, she does. she does. not that much. and lin was from a big city in myanmar. how did you decide to join the resistance movement and what propelled you to do that? i am just 25 years of youth. she describes herself as just a normal kid. make up   kpop. kpop, yeah. she sold cosmetics online, she went to med school. in 2021 february, i joined to the protest. and like   when the coup happens, she joins the protest movement, like many young people   they started shooting and starting killing the people   but when the crackdowns happened, most of her friends, she says, just went home and kept their heads down. so they told me not to do so. just go back to the university and just finish your degree. and there was something in lin that was not able to just go back to her old life. so i choose my way, you choose your way and yeah. and so she made this decision to run away and became part of this resistance movement. and what was that transition like? that’s quite a big thing, to go to the jungle and completely change your life. i think it was really, really hard. it is an intense experience for a comfortable city girl to end up in the middle of jungle warfare. and she has been working   she actually doesn’t have her medical degree because she left before she was able to get it, but every day, she is working triage, and she is wrapping bullet wounds and getting pieces of shrapnel out of wounded soldiers. she has a saw that she uses for amputations for the victims of landmines. a saw? a saw, yes. everybody has their own saw. and she is getting a medical education that you would never get in a theoretical world of a medical university. she is trained to plunge her hands into the chest cavities of wounded soldiers to extract pieces of shrapnel. and what she has is a commitment to this idea of democracy that i think is extraordinarily powerful. and she is literally laying down her life for that cause. and lin is just one member of hundreds of groups with tens of thousands of people in them in this resistance, which, at this moment of time, seem to really be turning the tide against the military. it’s so clear that these rebels are fighting for something they really believe in, but how is this coalition? how are these groups, like the kndf you spend time with, actually winning territory back from a professional military? you’re right. the myanmar military is very well equipped. it has fighter jets. it has big, bad war making machines, but one of the things that the rebels have is a game changer and an equalizer in modern warfare. and that’s a cheap homemade drone. you mean like a very simple drone, the kind that i bought for my daughter at best buy? yeah. so if you take that drone that you got for your daughter at best buy and you hand it to a karenni rebel soldier and they go on the internet and they start communicating with somebody in ukraine, they take that very simple drone and they start adding bits and pieces to it, and they change something that is used for photography and they turn it into a machine that can drop bombs on the enemy frontlines. wow. so they’re actually communicating with other pro democracy fighters, if you will, in ukraine and other places about how to do this? yeah. and it was really remarkable because when i went to the drone base of the kndf, they were using laser cutters, they were using 3d printers, and they were creating a modern fleet of drones that has the potential to fight against something like a fighter jet. and that really is a game changer. it’s interesting. so these rebel drones are clearly proving to be a real headache for the military. is that the main reason or is there anything else that explains the rebel’s success? i think the main reason is this really unlikely alliance that has formed between the kids from the cities who have come to the jungles and this array of ethnic militias. some of these ethnic militias, in a complicated way, don’t like each other. and so not only are they fighting the junta, but they’re also fighting themselves. and what has changed for the first time since the coup is that these ethnic militias that had these kind of internecine problems have decided to unify for a common goal, which is to fight the junta. and they’re beginning to train and help the young people who are coming from the cities. and that’s really something that’s never happened before. most of these young people from the cities may have played video games. that was their experience of war beforehand. and they’re coming into the jungle and they don’t know how to fight. they shouldn’t know how to fight, but they were given training and weapons and military knowhow, how to throw a grenade, how to protect yourself, basic first aid. all of these things were being taught to them. and these city kids have been fighting and dying alongside members of these ethnic militias. and i think this trust that has developed between them has really changed the tenor of the war. so given that they’re gaining territory, given that this alliance for the first time seems to be holding, is there a chance that they actually win? that’s a very good question. as difficult as what has happened has been for the resistance, i think it’s the easy part. capturing remote areas is a lot easier than moving into the heartland of the country, where the big cities are. and that’s going to be a really difficult thing for the resistance to be able to push into and claim. so what lies ahead is the really tough part. oh yes. let’s say somehow, the resistance is able to push in and put the junta on its back heels in the heartland and kick them out of some big cities, at a certain point, i think members of the alliance are going to realize that they have fundamentally different goals. some of the ethnic militias want to become independent of a country called myanmar, some of them want to control the gains of enlisted economy. myanmar is one of the biggest producers of methamphetamine, of fentanyl, of opium. and then there are also some people who really want democracy. and so it’s very hard to imagine, even if they succeed militarily, for these groups to be able to agree on what they envision myanmar to look like. so does that mean the idea of some future united democracy is not actually realistic? across these different groups, everybody agrees the idea of federal democracy is a good thing. i don’t know when it comes down to actually forming a new government should the resistance be able to do so, whether the temptation of power will prove to be a more potent force than this gauzy idea of federal democracy. and i think the reality right now, and even should the resistance win, is a myanmar that is fractured and splintered. so what does that mean for the young people fighting in the jungle? are they talking about this? are they conscious of the risks of their country being fractured and splintered? and are they prepared for such an outcome? it’s very easy for political theorists to talk about, is this a fractured state or is this a splintered state or is this a functioning democracy, but i think for the people who are actually on the ground, they are fighting for very specific things, which is a resumption of their lives as they were before the coup. and that was a life in which things were slowly getting better, and they had certain freedoms, and they were able to vote, and they were able to participate in a yes, flawed democracy but a democracy nonetheless. and that is what they’re fighting for. and revolutions fail and they fail and they fail until they succeed. and i think for the young people who are in myanmar, they are willing to give their lives for what maybe to me seems a slim chance, but for them, it’s what keeps them going day after day in the jungles, to fight for a better future for young people and for all the people in myanmar. hannah, thank you. thank you, katrin. [music playing] we’ll be right back. here’s what else you need to know today. on sunday, israel’s prime minister benjamin netanyahu lashed out at the united states for the second time in a week. netanyahu accused the biden administration of withholding weapons for the war in gaza. his comments came as israel’s minister of defense arrived in washington for meetings with senior us officials. tensions over israel’s conduct during its war in gaza have been rising between netanyahu and biden in recent weeks. a day before netanyahu’s latest complaints, israeli soldiers tied a wounded palestinian to the top of a military vehicle in the wesbank. the scene was captured on video and quickly went viral, causing outrage. the israeli military said the act violated military procedure and that there would be an investigation. [upbeat music] today’s episode was produced by shannon lin, nina feldman, rachelle bonja, with help from asthaa chaturvedi. it was edited by m.j. davis lin, with help from patricia willens, contains original music by dan powell and diane wang and was engineered by chris wood. our theme music is by jim brunberg and ben landsverk of wonderly. [music playing] that’s it for “the daily.” i’m katrin bennhold. see you tomorrow. hosted by katrin bennhold featuring hannah beech produced by shannon m. linnina feldman and rachelle bonja with asthaa chaturvedi edited by m.j. davis lin and patricia willens original music by dan powell and diane wong engineered by chris wood warning: this episode contains descriptions of injuries. myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet. but something new is happening. unusual numbers of young people from the cities, including students, poets and baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. and this coalition is making startling gains against the country’s military dictatorship. hannah beech, who covers stories across asia for the times, discusses this surprising resistance movement. hannah beech, a bangkok based reporter for the new york times, focusing on investigative and in depth stories in asia. rebel fighters have handed myanmar’s army defeat after defeat, for the first time raising the possibility that the military junta could be at risk of collapse. what’s happening in myanmar’s civil war? there are a lot of ways to listen to the daily. here’s how. we aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. you can find them at the top of the page. the daily is made by rachel quester, lynsea garrison, clare toeniskoetter, paige cowett, michael simon johnson, brad fisher, chris wood, jessica cheung, stella tan, alexandra leigh young, lisa chow, eric krupke, marc georges, luke vander ploeg, m.j. davis lin, dan powell, sydney harper, mike benoist, liz o. baylen, asthaa chaturvedi, rachelle bonja, diana nguyen, marion lozano, corey schreppel, rob szypko, elisheba ittoop, mooj zadie, patricia willens, rowan niemisto, jody becker, rikki novetsky, john ketchum, nina feldman, will reid, carlos prieto, ben calhoun, susan lee, lexie diao, mary wilson, alex stern, sophia lanman, shannon lin, diane wong, devon taylor, alyssa moxley, summer thomad, olivia natt, daniel ramirez and brendan klinkenberg. our theme music is by jim brunberg and ben landsverk of wonderly. special thanks to sam dolnick, paula szuchman, lisa tobin, larissa anderson, julia simon, sofia milan, mahima chablani, elizabeth davis moorer, jeffrey miranda, maddy masiello, isabella anderson, nina lassam and nick pitman. katrin bennhold is the berlin bureau chief. a former nieman fellow at harvard university, she previously reported from london and paris, covering a range of topics from the rise of populism to gender. more about katrin bennhold hannah beech is a times reporter based in bangkok who has been covering asia for more than 25 years. she focuses on in depth and investigative stories. more about hannah beech

commentary january 24, 2024 crisis & conflict management democracy, conflict, & governance foreign politics & elections foreign policy strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology initiative on nonstate armed actors this piece is part of a series titled “nonstate armed actors and illicit economies in 2024” from brookings’s initiative on nonstate armed actors. despite military conflict persisting across large swaths of myanmar in 2024, the ruling military junta will retain firm control of the major population centers   namely, yangon, naypyidaw, and mandalay. the kaleidoscopic patchwork of resistance groups currently does not demonstrate the capacity to displace the military from these major urban centers, especially without significant and unlikely external support. while control of many areas in the country is contested, the regime does not actually need to control the entire country to “win”   it hasn’t fully controlled the country since its independence. while myanmar is no stranger to conflict, often referred to as the world’s longest running civil war, the current fighting is unique in its intensity and the spread of violence to bamar ethnic regions. the risk of regional escalation remains very low without unlikely expansion into a full proxy war by foreign powers. however, the conflict in myanmar sits at a dynamic nexus of u.s. and western foreign policy priorities, and objectives there will remain complicated by both friendly nations and adversaries that have significant stakes in the conflict’s dynamics and outcome. the governing junta, the state administration council (sac), led by de facto dictator min aung hlaing, also the commander in chief of the military, continues to delay democratic elections in violation of the state constitution while dismantling political opposition. the most externally visible member of the opposition, the national unity government (nug), attempts to shadow govern from exile. it has secured some western backing   including formal recognition by the european parliament   although no country has formally recognized it as myanmar’s legitimate government or provided any military or significant financial support. however, internal to myanmar, the powerful ethnic armed organizations (eaos) still provide the most significant power and influence behind the resistance. thus, the mutual support between the nug and the most powerful eaos is critical to maintaining pressure on the junta. yet, even within this construct, some eaos view the ongoing conflict as an opportunity to expand their territory and influence versus an altruistic struggle for democracy. despite some proclamations at the end of 2023 of a tide turning momentum shift based on the surprising success of operation 1027 in shan state, myanmar’s armed resistance is not a monolithic and homogenous nationwide “movement” with a single leader, unified command and control, and coordinated operations. as it has been since the 1960s, it remains an array of groups with varying alliances, loyalties, military capabilities, and objectives, albeit with a common enemy. the two main categories of resistance groups are the eaos, some of which have been battling the military for decades, and the people’s defense forces (pdfs), which emerged after the 2021 coup. eao interests and priorities focus on autonomy for their ethnic groups. many of the larger eaos function as sub state governing entities, not just guerilla armies. the largest and most powerful eaos, such as the kachin independence organization and the karen national union, provide administration services such as schools, healthcare systems, public works infrastructure, and defense. the separate, but not always distinct, pdfs have developed into a complex venn diagram of overlapping affiliations, command and control structures, and support networks. some pdfs directly fall under the nug’s command and support, while others are aligned under eaos, and still others operate independently and, in some reported cases, have been accused of extrajudicial killings and other abuses. additionally complicating the landscape, pdfs in eao border regions often share oversight from nug and eao leadership   highlighting that the powerful eaos remain the country’s true power brokers. importantly, pdfs conduct most of the combat operations in major urban areas and bamar regions, where historically the military has not faced significant armed opposition. thus, they open additional battlefield fronts that strain the military’s operational and logistical infrastructure and impact morale. but the resistance groups still lack the military capability and hardware to fight at scale in major population centers where the regime has deployed significant layered defenses of sophisticated conventional forces and expansive intelligence networks. to dislodge the regime, the resistance would require significant external funding, training, and military equipment. nationwide coordination of these capabilities would be required for a simultaneous and unified strategic campaign capable of overwhelming the military. the lack of unity and cohesion in the resistance groups’ command structures and coordination underscores an already nonexistent foreign willingness to become militarily involved. it complicates how any foreign military support could be distributed effectively without causing additional instability and infighting between the groups. difficult logistics further complicate any foreign military support: neither thailand nor india, whose territory and land routes would be crucial for the scale of military support required, is highly unlikely to lend any support or approval to such activities. in fact, they are both increasing their engagement with the junta. foreign actors in myanmar also have varying degrees of alignment, with several openly opposing western objectives. china’s role in myanmar is often mischaracterized and oversimplified. erroneously, the myanmar regime is described as being very close to china by choice, while china is said to wield such influence that myanmar is essentially its proxy state. in reality, china’s outsized role in myanmar mostly stems from its geographic proximity and power preponderance, instead of an alignment of values or interests. despite the regime and population’s resentments vis à vis china, myanmar’s international pariah status drives it to accept china’s support and influence. beijing’s overriding priority in myanmar is maintaining stability, especially in regions bordering china. china has long been known to “play both sides” of the conflict in myanmar   providing military and economic aid to the ruling government, while also supporting numerous eaos, including the largest and most militarily powerful eao, the united wa state army, which is widely seen as a proxy of china’s people’s liberation army. russia’s relationship with myanmar is much more transactional, with russia significantly increasing its ties with the regime since the 2021 coup. three of min aung hlaing’s overseas trips since the coup have been to russia. sharing an international pariah status, russia and myanmar have signed multiple agreements   from tourism, media, and education exchanges to increased military ties and nuclear power development. direct military support includes russia’s delivery of su 30 fighter jets and counterinsurgency training and advising. russia has been able to support the junta despite the war in ukraine constraining its assistance capacities. the junta likely sees closer ties with russia as a hedge against overdependence on china. russia and china’s policies are clearly adversarial toward western interests in myanmar. however, thailand, an essential regional u.s. ally, and india, a critical u.s. regional partner and member, along with the united states, of the quad, also complicate western policymaking. unlike the western hardline anti regime stance, thailand and india must balance democratic values against geographic realities. both bilaterally and within the association of southeastern asian nations, thailand has begun normalizing its engagement with the myanmar regime in trade, energy, humanitarian assistance, and even military cooperation. hosting the majority of myanmar’s refugees is straining thailand’s resources and humanitarian networks, and bangkok is concerned that the ongoing fighting in eastern myanmar could spill into western thailand. economic interests are also a factor: for example, recently imposed u.s. sanctions against the regime controlled myanma oil and gas enterprise (moge) pose a direct negative impact on thailand’s own state oil company, ptt, which owns a controlling stake in some of moge’s largest oil and gas fields. it is because of these negative impacts on thailand, as well as on some u.s. companies, that moge sanctions have been delayed for so long, despite being one of the most called for sanctions targets by regime opposition groups. the united states specifically structured the sanctions to maximize the impact on the regime, while minimizing the impact on thailand. with its top priorities to counter chinese influence in its backyard and growing instability and humanitarian crises along the india myanmar border, india too has moved toward normalizing relations with the junta. india is particularly concerned with the maritime realm and china’s construction of the kyaukpyu port in western myanmar, among other activities. the port provides chinese naval vessels with access to the indian ocean and is near one of india’s most strategic naval bases. although resistance groups have periodically made significant gains against the regime’s military, it would be premature and unwise to predict a nationwide collapse of the regime based on essentially idiosyncratic circumstances. for decades, the regime’s military has proved to be resilient and cunningly effective, if highly brutal, in maintaining power. ultimately, both the junta and the resistance groups view the fight as an existential conflict. resistance constituencies have decried talks of negotiations as submitting to the junta. although regularly negotiating with eaos, the junta has adamantly refused to negotiate with the nug, labeling it a terrorist group. yet in the foreseeable future, neither side will have the military capability to decisively seize contested areas and “win.” nevertheless, for the regime, “winning” requires only maintaining control of the major population centers and outlasting the resistance. without significant, but unlikely, external military and financial support for the resistance, the conflict will drag on in ebbs and flows of momentum without truly threatening the military’s core power centers, thereby extending human suffering and impeding the country from reestablishing democratic civilian rule. the conclusions and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the u.s. government, department of defense, or the u.s. air force. author related content yun sun january 16, 2024 yun sun february 13, 2023 2023 online only monday, 7:00 pm   8:30 pm edt the brookings institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact. we are supported by a diverse array of funders. in line with our values and policies, each brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s). crisis & conflict management democracy, conflict, & governance foreign politics & elections foreign policy myanmar strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology initiative on nonstate armed actors constantino xavier, dhruv banerjee august 27, 2024 yun sun january 16, 2024 yun sun february 13, 2023 get the latest from brookings the brookings institution is a nonprofit organization based in washington, d.c. our mission is to conduct in depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, 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two loudspeakers, as big as the men carrying them, are brought to the rocky hilltop. some 800m below, in the town of hpasang, lies a sprawling myanmar army base. it’s a blisteringly hot day   above 40c   and behind, on bamboo poles, more young resistance fighters carry a large, heavy battery pack and amplifier. leading the ascent is nay myo zin, a former army captain who, after 12 years in the military, defected to the resistance. with his dark green camouflage jacket draped over one shoulder, he has the air of a performer about to take the stage. he is here to urge the soldiers in the base below, who are loyal to the country’s ruling military, to switch sides. in this jungle deep in karenni state in the east of myanmar, two forces face each other in a fight that has, in one way or another, been going on for decades. but the rapid advances by the resistance in recent months indicate that this time they may have the advantage. the south east asian nation is at a crossroads   after decades of military rule and brutal repression, ethnic groups, along with a new army of young insurgents, have brought the dictatorship to crisis point. in the past seven months, somewhere between half and two thirds of the country has fallen to the resistance. tens of thousands of people have been killed, including many children, since the military seized power in a coup in 2021. some 2.5 million have been displaced, and the military facing an unprecedented challenge to its rule and in an attempt to thwart the growing resistance regularly bombs civilians, schools and churches from its warplanes (the resistance has none). before nay myo zin’s sound equipment is switched on, the army opens fire on his position. undeterred, with a flick of the switch and microphone in hand, he bellows: “everyone, cease fire! cease fire, please. just listen for five minutes, 10 minutes.” somewhat surprisingly, the barrage stops. he tells them of the 4,000 soldiers who surrendered to the opposition in northern shan state, and the recent insurgent drone attacks on military buildings in the country’s capital nay pyi taw. the message is, we are winning, your regime is falling, it is time to give up. here in hpasang and across karenni state, across much of the country, battles and stalemates have taken hold as a great rolling rebellion threatens the rule of the military junta. the military coup in 2021 brought an end to the elected civilian government, and its leader aung san suu kyi remains imprisoned, along with other political leaders. yet this is an under reported conflict   with much of the world’s attention on ukraine and the israel gaza conflict. there is no press freedom, foreign journalists are rarely allowed to enter officially and when they do are heavily monitored. there is no way to hear the resistance side of this story through government approved visits. we travelled into myanmar and spent a month in the east of the country living alongside resistance groups fighting across karenni state, which borders thailand, and shan state, which borders china. we travelled on jungle tracks and backroads, to front lines where the military has been cut off and surrounded for weeks, where like in hpasang, the fighters have the high ground. in others, such as moebye, further north, the opposition has suffered heavy losses as it attempted direct assaults across heavily mined ground. there, and in loikaw, the state capital, the strength of the rebellion and its limitations are in plain view. in hpasang, the resistance has been playing a waiting game, confident that they have the upper hand. some 80 soldiers have been trapped inside the base for more than a month, with about 100 more believed to be dead or injured. up on the hilltop, via his loudspeaker, nay myo zin makes the case for surrender: “we have surrounded you. there is no possibility of a helicopter coming. ground troops support? no. you have time today to decide whether to switch to the people’s side.” there’s silence from the military camp below. nay myo zin urges them to abandon min aung hlaing, the general in charge of the ruling junta. “all your lives will surely be spared. this is the highest promise that i can give. so, don’t be foolish. would you rather protect tyrant min aung hlaing’s unjustifiable wealth until your last breath? now, i am waiting to welcome you.” moments pass, there is only the sound of flies buzzing on the hilltop, as perhaps the junta forces are considering their response. it is no easy decision, if they surrender and are returned to military controlled areas, they will probably be sentenced to death. their answer comes loudly; definitively. they again fire on the rocky outpost, the insurgents begin to duck for cover. there will be no surrender today. nay myo zin continues broadcasting, regardless. to his side, on a radio, the commander of the operation to capture the base adopts a different approach. on the same frequency as the military men, he exchanges insults with them. in an onslaught of slurs, he accuses them of being min aung hlaing’s guard dogs, and of being unfaithful to their country. the soldiers respond with insults of their own. cut off from the resupply of men and food, they stand their ground, firm in their belief that it is the military’s right   its destiny   to rule the country. the ideological gulf between both sides is unbridgeable. the carrot and stick approach continues for another 30 minutes or so, before the resistance fighters withdraw. in his enthusiastic appeal for surrender nay myo zin has inadvertently given away the men’s position (“i’m 400 yards away beside the loudspeakers,” he said), and they are worried about an artillery or mortar strike. later that evening, the hillside takes a direct hit, without injuries. this is more than just an ideological battle, it is a generational war. the young against the establishment, a new order fighting to break free from a tenacious old order. the connected versus a disconnected elite. the same youth who heard tales of failed revolutions and who have decided now is their time. after half a century of military rule, myanmar enjoyed a brief experiment with democracy starting in 2015 under suu kyi and her national league for democracy. for many young people those years, though not without deep problems, marked an all too short golden age of freedom. the ballot box had failed them, then peaceful protest in the wake of the coup was met with killings and arrests. many of those fighting told us there had been no alternative but to take up arms. thousands have abandoned studies and careers in major cities such as yangon   doctors, mathematicians, martial arts fighters   and fled the cities to join established ethnic and resistance groups that had long opposed military rule. on this front, all the fighters are under 25. nam ree, a 22 year old with the karenni nationalities defence force, kndf, explains why he joined the resistance. “the dogs [a commonly used insult for the military] have been unjust. they carried out an unlawful military coup. we, the youth, are discontented with it,” he says. he is wearing flip flops, blue nail varnish, faded combat trousers and ammo belt across a barcelona fc top. unlike most of the men around him, he has a ballistic helmet. no one has body armour. the kndf are a new force of young fighters and commanders which appeared after the coup. ethnic armed groups have been fighting against the military in karenni   also known as kayah state   for decades. but the kndf has brought them unity and battlefield success. the tide turned against the junta on 27 october last year when an alliance of groups in the north of the country overran military positions and border crossings. dozens more towns across the country have fallen since then into the hands of the armed opposition. the military still controls the main cities, but is losing control of the countryside and myanmar’s borders. the kndf says it, and other insurgent groups, now control 90% of the karenni state. it may be the smallest in the country but it has become a hardcore centre of resistance. under the shade of a mango orchard sits the powerfully built, tattooed kndf deputy commander, maui pho thaike. an environmentalist who studied in the united states, he first picked up a gun three years ago. he doesn’t recognise the military junta as a government, it is the oppressor of the country’s many ethnic regions, he says. he says the whole country is now fighting the army. “the strategies are changing. all the attacks are now co ordinated,” he says. the kndf has no lack of fighters, but ammunition and weapons are in desperately short supply. mostly the insurgency is funded by donations from the country’s diaspora. “we do have enough heart, we do have enough morale, we do have enough humanity. that's the way we're going to defeat them,” maui says. a tattoo on his hand reads “free thinker”   from another time, when myanmar was briefly on its thwarted move to democracy. are you still a free thinker, i ask him. “in this uniform, no,” he replies. “but without this uniform, i’m a free man. and that’s our dream. we’ll create it again.” to enter myanmar is to travel not just to a forgotten war, but to country severed from the outside world. much of the mobile phone network, internet and electricity has been cut off in karenni state. the military may be on the back foot but their remaining bases control the main roads through the state. a 60km (37 mile) drive from hpasang further north to the town of demoso took more than 10 hours across rutted dirt tracks, over hills and through rivers and valleys. we arrived to the aftermath of a failed assault on a military base in the nearby town of moebye, in which 27 members of the resistance had been killed. in a jungle hospital, young men from the kndf lie on hospital beds on dirt floors. some smile and give a thumbs up, most are missing limbs. aung ngle, 23, has a horribly swollen left leg after taking shrapnel to his femoral artery in the attack on the base. he is too ill to talk, but as he begins to weep, three of his comrades come to him, holding and comforting him. they won’t be able to operate. he will have to make the long journey to thailand for further treatment. i ask a doctor if he will survive. “he will be fine,” he says. “but right now i think he’s depressed because he can’t fight anymore.” in many respects, this is a conflict from another age, brutal and intimate. the fighting in moebye lasted for days, at close quarters, with uphill frontal infantry assaults on the military’s bunkers. one man has multiple injuries to his hands, legs and stomach. they were caused by a hand grenade, he says. they had gone to retrieve a commander who had been hit in the leg when it came in. “it was at close range   about 30ft,” he says. the war has a slow ferocity, as we saw for ourselves when we travelled further north into southern shan state, towards the town of hsihseng. near there, a counter offensive was underway as the military tried to capture the route to loikaw, the state capital, which also remains contested. it is not their state, but the kndf is in the lead under the command of a fighter called darthawr. he, like many of his men, has been injured in previous attacks and a dark red scar peeks out from under the arm of his t shirt. “defending this place for us is like defending our home,” he tells me. he is in shorts and flip flops and neither he nor his men have body armour. nor do we. as we stand on a low hilltop by a banana grove, he points out the military’s positions, 1.5km (0.9 miles) away. shells begin landing nearby and there is a scramble to some shallow trenches. the shells, likely mortars, keep coming in, getting closer. a sustained exchange of automatic gunfire can be heard at close range   it sounds like the soldiers are far closer than previously thought. it quickly becomes apparent that a group of soldiers is making its way through a minefield to our position. we leave, driving at speed as the shelling continues, a mortar striking the road directly ahead of the vehicles. “their troops got injured, and that’s why they are randomly shooting everywhere,” darthawr explained. at a graduation ceremony on a baked hard dirt parade ground cleared in the jungle, rank after rank of new recruits march past in formation. they salute the kndf leadership, their rubber soled canvas boots stamping up the dust. the young men and women   many just turned 18   march to the beat of a song in english, “warrior”. its lyrics: i am last to leave, but the first to go lord, make me dead before you make me old i am a soldier and i'm marching on i am a warrior and this is my song there are more than 500   a record number of recruits. the ranks have been swollen after the junta, running short of men, enacted a conscription decree which sent young people in their hundreds fleeing to insurgent territory to join the revolutionary cause. the last time i saw the troops, they were training with bamboo rifles. now they have the real thing. their commander, maui tells me that there isn’t much time for training. “our strategy is like, we organised one month training, intensive training, then we go to fight.” as the ceremony ends the mood is wild. a young rapper, mc kayar lay, who also graduated that day sends the fresh recruits into a frenzy of dancing and celebration. it is difficult to predict where the uprising will lead. for both sides, this is an existential war and one increasingly marked by bloodshed and bitterness. there appears to be no going back. after three and a half weeks, we were back in hpasang. the army base, which had been about to be stormed by the resistance when i left, remained standing. the military had tried to send in reinforcements   some 100 men   but in a battle with the insurgents, 57 were captured, the rest fled or were killed. the army failed to resupply the base but the encounter with the opposition forces had another consequence. it meant armed revolutionaries' ammunition was depleted   and they no longer were able mount an attack on the outpost. the day before we arrived, army war planes had bombed the hilltop overlooking hpasang, killing three of the young fighters we had met earlier, and injuring 10. before, there had been music and singing from their positions on the banks of the wide salween river, an almost relaxed willingness to wait out their enemy. but now the mood had darkened   more appeals for surrender seemed unlikely. it would now be a battle to the death. vittorio sella's work shaped both mountain photography and mountaineering history. the japanese prime minister gets much needed reassurances that his country is still america's top ally. pm modi's party is set to form a government in the indian capital after 27 years. the japanese firm's $14.9bn (£12bn) takeover was blocked by president joe biden on national security grounds. subramaniam iswaran's case gripped the island nation that prides itself with its squeaky clean image. copyright 2025 bbc. all rights reserved. the bbc is not responsible for the content of external sites. read about our approach to external linking.

young people are leading opposition to the coup and have not been deterred by the military’s harassment, surveillance and brutality. before the military seized power from the civilian government in myanmar early last year and proceeded to kill and arrest thousands, hnin si enjoyed a peaceful life in the southern city of dawei. during the week, she would go to her office; at the weekend, she would explore nearby nature on her bicycle or go hiking with friends in the mountains overlooking the andaman sea. those days are gone. as the military attempts to extinguish widespread opposition to its rule, it has targeted its crackdown on the young people who make up the core of the resistance. adding to the burden facing myanmar’s young people, the country’s economy is collapsing, and their dreams of furthering their education are vanishing. “the junta is treating every single youth as their worst enemy,” said ko bo kyi, joint secretary of the assistance association for political prisoners. the rights documentation group says more than 900 people aged between 16 and 35 have been killed in the military’s crackdowns on the pro democracy movement and more than 2,800 in that age group arrested. “the youth should be the future of the country. and yet, we have this so called military detaining, torturing, and killing them,” added ko bo kyi. “it is destroying our country and future society.” al jazeera spoke to eight people in their 20s and early 30s from myanmar’s southernmost tanintharyi region, where local armed resistance groups have gathered strength over the past year and the military has responded by increasing its surveillance, killings and arrests. those interviewed described cities and towns bereft of young people, who have largely fled the country, sought shelter in areas under the control of armed resistance groups, or joined the resistance themselves. those who remain in areas under military control said they live in fear and desperation. hnin si, who is in her late 20s, protested peacefully and started a facebook page to raise funds for striking civil servants in the weeks after the coup, but now hardly goes outside or posts online at all. she recently hid at a friend’s house for days after learning that a close contact had been arrested for providing humanitarian support to people forced from their homes by the fighting. “we, young people, are feeling like we are stuck here and our future is hopeless,” she said. all people interviewed for this report, with the exception of one protest leader who requested his real name be used, have been identified by their requested nicknames or given pseudonyms due to the risk of military reprisals. within days of the coup in february 2021, myanmar had erupted into peaceful demonstrations, but by last april, the military’s use of lethal force on hundreds of unarmed civilians had driven young people across the country to take up arms instead. as the public has adapted its revolutionary tactics, the military has worked to ensure that there are few safe places for anyone who opposes its rule. soldiers and police commonly raid the homes of suspected dissidents; they also go house to house checking for overnight guests who have failed to register with the authorities. to lure opponents out of hiding, the military has also gone after their family members and associates. since the coup, more than 450 people, including elderly parents and young children, have been arrested in this manner, according to aapp data. security forces also stop people randomly on the street and search through their phones for evidence of support for the resistance, and at least seven people have been fatally shot for driving through checkpoints without stopping, according to aapp. it also identifies one person who was gunned down for riding on the back of a motorcycle, which has been outlawed for males since november. online activity is also dangerous. more than 200 people have been arrested this year on charges of incitement and “terrorism” for social media posts, while seven people were sentenced to 7 to 10 years on charges of “funding terrorism” for making mobile bank transfers of less than $10 to armed resistance groups, according to radio free asia. in tanintharyi, where clashes between resistance groups and the military began last august, the situation has deteriorated dramatically. a report published this month by southern monitor, a local research group focusing on tanintharyi, found that the risks of being shot, arrested or extorted for money by military forces had increased. “young people are the most involved in the current armed conflict, and they are also the most affected group,” a spokesperson told al jazeera in a written reply to questions. in rural tanintharyi, the military has also burned homes, fired artillery into civilian areas and occupied villages, displacing 23,000 people according to the united nations. southern monitor reported that 7,000 of those displaced remain unable to return home. noe noe, 21, fled her village of taku this march as fighting escalated around her. two months later, four men’s bodies were found near the village. they had been decapitated after allegedly being captured by the military during the fighting. the residents of 20 nearby villages evacuated due to the violence. “there is no one left in my village,” said noe noe, who now lives in a camp. “my biggest fear now is that the military will attack the place where i am staying. if they do, we have nowhere else to run.” even though the military has already killed more than 2,200 people and arrested more than 15,000 in its crackdowns on the pro democracy movement, some protest groups continue to hold peaceful demonstrations. “we even protest in these complicated, dangerous times,” said raymond, a protest leader in tanintharyi’s launglone township who takes part in rallies several times a week. before the coup, raymond had planned to study abroad; now, he moves from place to place to avoid arrest. his protest group relies on community donations to meet their basic needs, but at a time of soaring commodity prices, the crashing value of the kyat and a bleak formal economy, they can barely top up their mobile data or buy petrol to drive their motorbikes to protest sites. at times, they do not even have enough to eat; sometimes, they have to scatter into the jungle to avoid military soldiers. “to live in myanmar under dictatorship is like living in hell,” said raymond. rights groups and the media have documented the military’s systematic torture of political prisoners since the coup, but raymond said his biggest fear is that if he were to be arrested, he would not be able to continue protesting. his fellow protest leader, minlwin oo, has faced numerous close encounters with soldiers. one of hundreds of thousands of striking civil servants, the former government engineer organised some of the first protests in dawei. in march, the military raided his safe house and arrested eight people. by april, he had relocated to launglone and begun leading protests there instead. in november, soldiers ransacked his family’s house in dawei and arrested his mother. according to minlwin oo’s account, they beat her with their guns and interrogated her for four days before releasing her. more recently, a military affiliated militia has threatened minlwin oo and his family on facebook. “[they] warned me not to continue striking or any other activities, and said they would kill me and my family members if i continued,” he said. in the past year, such groups have killed numerous people associated with the resistance, including 18 people in southern myanmar, according to a report published by the human rights foundation of monland. although minlwin oo worries for the safety of his wife and small child, he has resolved not to back down. “we cannot stay silent. we have to do our work despite these threats,” he said. “all families’ future plans and dreams in my country have been destroyed … if we don’t fight against military dictatorship, we will never be free.” few others are willing to stay, and tanintharyi has experienced an exodus of young people. “many youth who took part in anti coup activities had to flee,” said stee, who is 24. “not many young people [still] live in the cities.” although she protested with her university student union in tanintharyi’s southern city of myeik in the weeks after the coup, by april, she had left the city and begun moving from place to place in nearby villages. earlier this year, she moved to a so called “liberated area” under the control of an armed resistance group, where she now volunteers to support the education and humanitarian needs of conflict displaced people. other young people have left the country altogether. shine, 25, fled myeik last march after a convoy of seven trucks arrived at his house to arrest him for his role in leading protests. while his parents took shelter in a nearby village, shine hid on a rubber plantation. after two more close encounters with military forces, he hired an agent to arrange his escape to thailand this may. before the coup, he had once flown to thailand to represent his university at a technology conference, but this time, he entered the country on foot and is now washing dishes on an island. “i want to study, but here i am working at a restaurant,” he said. “whenever i think about it, i feel upset and angry at the military and i also feel like i lost my future.” although he is no longer on the run from myanmar soldiers and police, he now fears encountering thai authorities, who often deport groups of undocumented refugees or migrants. “i took an illegal route. if i were to get arrested and the thai government were to return me to the military’s hands, i can’t imagine what would happen to me,” he said. he also worries about his parents’ safety   this year, fighting has escalated in the area where they are living. “sometimes i feel guilty when i think about how my family suffered because of me,” he said. his sense of guilt is compounded when he talks to his peers back in the country. “my friends said that i left for my own good, and people also tell me that i am not part of the revolution,” he said. many young people have also joined the armed resistance. thar, 32, fled myeik for a liberated area last march, after four military trucks surrounded the office where she worked as a journalist as she hid inside. at the time, the military was scaling up its crackdowns on the media. in total, it has arrested more than 130 journalists since the coup. unable to continue her journalism from the liberated area due to poor internet access, thar trained as a medic with an armed resistance group instead. this april, she was deployed to the battlefront near her village. “i heard that my father was sick in bed, but i couldn’t see him or tend to him. i was really sad, but i encouraged myself that i am serving people for a greater cause,” she said. by then, her family had publicly disowned her   a measure taken by hundreds of families since the coup to avoid retaliation from the military against family members. “my parents want me to go to thailand where my relatives are, but i don’t want to go,” said thar. “only if we fight can we be free from military enslavement.” zin min htet contributed to this report. follow al jazeera english:

supported by as myanmar’s civil war heads into a fifth year, anti junta forces are opening universities and colleges as part of their pursuit of a federal democracy. by richard c. paddock the brief abduction of a chinese actor who was trafficked into myanmar to work in a scam camp has rattled travelers from a country that thailand relies on for tourism. by tiffany may, muktita suhartono and claire fu la guerra ha convertido a birmania en un paraíso para la delincuencia transnacional, con toda clase de actividades ilícitas, desde la producción de drogas hasta centros de ciberdelincuencia y más. by hannah beech the chaotic country is now a magnet for criminal syndicates, particularly from china, destabilizing law enforcement across much of asia. by hannah beech brutally persecuted for years by the military in myanmar, the rohingya ethnic minority has now become the target of one of the junta’s most formidable rivals in the country’s civil war. by hannah beech and adam ferguson tras casi cuatro años de conflicto civil, la economía está en ruinas y la población está desesperada. by sui lee wee nearly four years into a grinding civil conflict, the economy is in ruins, and people   even professionals with degrees   are desperate. by sui lee wee the country’s military leader has been accused of crimes against humanity over the army’s persecution of the rohingya ethnic group. by eve sampson the international criminal court’s chief prosecutor accused senior gen. min aung hlaing of crimes against humanity toward the country’s muslim rohingya. by sui lee wee he fled brutal repression   only to discover, as so many uyghur refugees have, that china’s power stretches far beyond its borders. by nyrola elimä and ben mauk

new york times rebel fighters have handed myanmar’s army defeat after defeat, for the first time raising the possibility that the military junta could be at risk of collapse. resistance soldiers riding in the back of a pickup truck in southern karenni state, in myanmar, in january.credit… by hannah beech photographs by adam ferguson hannah beech, who has been covering myanmar for nearly 20 years, recently spent a week reporting at a front line of the civil war. the night ma suu kyi thought she would die of her wounds on the front lines of a forgotten war, a crescent moon hung overhead. a pendant of the virgin mary dangled around her neck. maybe those augurs saved her. or maybe, she said, it was not yet time for her to die. “when i joined the revolution, i knew my chances of surviving were 50 50,” ms. suu kyi, 21, said of her decision to enlist as a rebel soldier, fighting to overthrow the junta that returned myanmar to military dictatorship three years ago. “i’m an ordinary girl, an ordinary young person. i believe in federal democracy and human rights.” ms. suu kyi said the words “federal democracy” in english. there are no easy words for the concept in burmese. since the junta in myanmar staged its coup in february 2021, ending a brief period of democratic reform and training its guns once again on peaceful protesters, much of the country has turned against the military. a new generation, which came of age during the civilian administration of the nobel laureate daw aung san suu kyi, has taken to arms, joining rebels who have opposed military dictatorship for decades. much of the fighting’s rhythm seems syncopated to that of another century: trenches dug into unrelenting mud, the slide of flip flops down monsoon soaked hills, the clatter of homemade ak style assault rifles in dusty towns. the junta’s multiple rocket launchers and fighter jets may bring a modern touch to the killing, as does the hovering of the resistance’s battle drones. but this conflict, with its hand to hand combat and profusion of land mines, feels like a throwback to the kind of civil war that was documented in black and white. if they manage to push into the nation’s heartland   no sure thing   the insurgents could unseat a military that has, in one form or another, kept myanmar in its grip for more than half a century. the result may be not so much a shifting of power as a shattering of a nation, its vast periphery breaking permanently away from central control. image “we want liberation from the myanmar army,” ms. suu kyi told me. “i am willing to sacrifice myself for that.” the resistance is largely bankrolled through crowdfunding by the myanmar diaspora: more than four million lived abroad before the coup, according to the united nations, and the outflow has intensified since then. other funding, particularly for certain ethnic armed groups, derives from the trade in illicit drugs or taxes on the gray economy. although countries like the united states have pledged money for democracy building and placed financial sanctions on members of the military regime and its cronies, they have not publicly allocated money for the armed rebellion. ms. suu kyi’s militia is called the karenni nationalities defense force, or k.n.d.f. claiming more than 8,000 soldiers, it is an umbrella organization for bands of armed youth in karenni, myanmar’s smallest state and the site of some of the most intense fighting. its frontline strategist, deputy cmdr. maui phoe thaike, is an environmentalist who studied at the university of montana at missoula. image the k.n.d.f. and its allied militias could soon control all of karenni, making it the first state in myanmar to break free from junta control, military analysts say. in a series of nationwide offensives starting last fall, insurgents have repelled the junta from large swaths of myanmar’s north, west and east. this month, guerrillas captured a major trading town on the border with thailand. naypyidaw, the capital of myanmar built by the junta as a defensive fortress, is fewer than 150 miles from karenni. facing resistance on many fronts, the junta said in february that it was implementing conscription for all young men and women in the country. morale has plunged, deserters from the military said, even as the bombardment of civilians has intensified. throughout the military’s half a century in power, various rebel forces have tried to unseat the generals. all have failed. this time, the opposition says, is different, in part because much of the country’s bamar ethnic majority has found unity with minorities living in the border regions. the young people who grew up during a period of openness, when myanmar welcomed foreign innovations such as facebook and k.f.c., chafe at how the junta has once again closed off the country. they know how much they have lost with the generals’ inward turn, and they have used social media to expose the junta’s atrocities: the imprisonment and torture of thousands of civilians, airstrikes on schools and hospitals, the killing of children with single shots to the head. image still, it’s far from certain whether the insurgents   not to mention the 214,000 government workers who are still striking as part of a civil disobedience campaign   can maintain their resolve for a fourth year or more. myanmar’s civil war is taking place far from the international spotlight that has clung to the conflicts in ukraine and gaza. the inequity has mystified some of the 55 million people of myanmar, who in the months after the coup lobbied the united nations to intervene to protect a vulnerable population. no help came. not a single country has recognized myanmar’s pro democracy shadow government, despite the accolades won by civilian leaders when they began sharing power with the military nearly a decade ago. but even as their plight has failed to capture global attention, doctors, lawyers, police officers, teachers, air force pilots and others have fled to rebel held areas to lend expertise to the armed resistance. there are thousands of such professionals now living in the jungles of myanmar. there are thousands more on the front lines. after the junta’s forces gunned down unarmed protesters in the wake of the coup, ma linn ni zho, a medical student, fled to karenni state and helped set up a secret hospital to treat rebel soldiers, as well as civilians maimed by land mines and airstrikes. the hospital is now the only major one operating in karenni, as the military’s aerial bombardment, per capita, outpaces the russian campaign in ukraine. “looking for the help of the u.n., looking for the help of the international governments, is like walking in the dark,” ms. linn ni zho said. “we have to do by ourself to escape from this kind of hell.” in an emergency ward camouflaged with netting and leaves, served only by a forest track, ms. linn ni zho tended to the casualties of war. the tools of a jungle hospital surrounded her: saws for amputations, yards of gauze for bullet wounds and a generator to power lights for surgery. severing limbs pulverized by land mines or plunging her arms into chest cavities torn apart by mortars was not what ms. linn ni zho thought she would be doing when she chose to study medicine. now 25, she grew up as myanmar’s military rulers voluntarily began sharing power with civilians. before that change, possessing an unregistered cellphone or foreign currency could land a person in prison for years. listening to b.b.c. radio broadcasts meant risking arrest. “all of us had big dreams, but i think they were normal dreams,” she said of her generation. image image the coup three years ago began with an internet blackout and the arrests of myanmar’s civilian cabinet, including ms. aung san suu kyi. for a citizenry collectively hunched over phones, checking facebook, the halt to communications came as a shock. (today in most of karenni, there is no phone or internet service.) within 20 days of the coup, the junta’s snipers had shot dead the first peaceful protester, a 20 year old woman standing in a crowd. since then, more than 4,800 protesters and political prisoners have been killed, and 26,500 people have been arrested, according to a tally by the assistance association for political prisoners (burma), which uses the former name for myanmar. “we lost all of our lives, all of our futures, with our human rights, civil rights violated every day,” ms. linn ni zho told me. “when dictatorship came, i just could not accept it as a youth.” ms. linn ni zho escaped to karenni, also known as kayah, which is home to ethnic minorities who have long been persecuted. for the first time, a significant multiethnic resistance was forming. with others from myanmar’s bamar dominated cities, ms. linn ni zho set up a hospital. image but in 2022, fighter jets targeted the facility. the medics built a new hospital deep in a forest to protect against airstrikes. the staff live in huts, bunkers dug into the earth for the bombardment they believe is inevitable. “they can destroy the buildings, but they cannot destroy our willpower,” ms. linn ni zho said. last november, resistance fighters rushed a soldier to the hospital: it was ms. suu kyi, the young rebel with the virgin mary pendant, who had been wounded during the k.n.d.f.’s attempt to take loikaw, the state capital. “i could not feel my body,” she said. “i thought this is what it feels like to die.” an x ray confirmed to ms. linn ni zho, who was on duty that day, that shrapnel had hurtled through ms. suu kyi’s back and pierced her lung. all they could do was wait to see if there was serious internal bleeding. three months later, ms. suu kyi was back on the front line in loikaw, an assault rifle slung over her shoulder. shrapnel remained lodged in her body. the enemy was close. on the way to visit her, new york times journalists passed a buddhist pagoda balanced, golden and delicate, on a rocky outcrop. the street had once hummed with pilgrims and schoolchildren. there had been a sushi bar. image now, the street was deserted, save the resistance fighters taking us to the abandoned house the k.n.d.f. had taken for an outpost. spent bullets glistened on the ground. barricades had been forsaken, metal twisted into ominous sculptures of war. ms. suu kyi was on the fourth day of a weeklong rotation. it had been a good day, she said: no artillery strikes nearby. she smiled. but then small arms fire cascaded from the myanmar military’s hillside position, striking just outside the house and flashing bright in the midday sun. ms. suu kyi smiled again as her fellow soldiers took aim out a window. a cat left behind by the house’s owners meowed in alarm. ms. suu kyi reached down to stroke it. before covid, before the coup, before the war, she was to study geography in college. she was to become a teacher. the cat brushed against ms. suu kyi, threading her legs in a nervous pattern, then slinked behind sandbags. “maybe after we win the revolution, i can continue my life again,” she said. “maybe not me, but people of my generation.” in a pine clearing in karenni state, 84 young men and 10 young women of the k.n.d.f.’s eighth battalion stood at attention. after 11 days of basic training, the soldiers were kitted out in new uniforms. new assault rifles leaned against trees. the soldiers saluted and pledged support for “federal democracy,” in english. before them stood 10 portraits of young men of the eighth battalion who had died in combat, out of about 400 soldiers. in a day or two, this next batch was heading to the front lines. a loudspeaker played a message from the k.n.d.f. leader, khun bedu. once a civil society activist, khun bedu had been jailed by myanmar’s military dictatorship. in prison, he and other founders of the militia were tortured, they said. their heads were wrapped in plastic bags, each breath robbing them of oxygen until the bag no longer moved into their mouths. the k.n.d.f. is both an example of how passionate guerrillas can repel a large and overstretched army and of such a militia’s limits. the commander of the eighth battalion used to drive a tour bus. one k.n.d.f. strategist was a national snooker champion. another worked the docks in singapore. image deputy commander maui phoe thaike was busy with organic farming projects when the coup occurred. today, he sends soldiers into battle. “i made a lot of mistakes at first, and a lot of our soldiers died,” he said. “but we learn every time, and we are getting stronger and stronger.” tattooed on his back is a partial record of the battlefield’s toll: tally marks in bundles of five, each representing a life lost. the lines stretch over his left shoulder, but he stopped adding them last may, before the militia’s biggest offensives. in the assault on loikaw late last year, at least 150 soldiers died, one k.n.d.f. leader said. another counted the number at double that. “i might run out of space on my back,” deputy commander maui phoe thaike said. “i don’t want to think about that.” on march 25, four more members of the eighth battalion were killed in loikaw. today, more than 80 percent of the population of karenni state is internally displaced. as the myanmar army retreated, its troops scattered land mines like rice seed, creating lasting hazards for civilians and combatants alike. in a christmas eve attack two years ago, junta forces killed about 35 civilians, including aid workers, leaving their charred bodies in vehicles on a road in karenni. image “we tried to protest peacefully, but the only language the burma army understands is bullets,” said deputy commander maui phoe thaike, himself a member of the bamar ethnic majority. “armed resistance is the only way for our revolution to succeed.” karenni forces said in late march that they held 90 percent of the state. the myanmar military calls civilians “terrorists” and terrorizes them with airstrikes and long range artillery. for all the new recruits into myanmar’s rebel forces   the college students and buddhist monks and civil servants   other soldiers have been fighting for far longer. when the military staged its first coup in 1962, isolating a once cosmopolitan country, its excuse was that the new nation was fragmenting. ethnic rebels were bearing down on the capital, demanding autonomy or at least a federal democracy. in the decades since, the military has continued to oppress ethnic minorities through organized sexual violence, the torching of villages and a policy of making ethnic minority children walk ahead of soldiers in minefields   tactics that united nations investigators have called crimes against humanity. the civilian administration that shared power with the military until the 2021 coup stood by, too, as the army targeted one ethnic group, the muslim rohingya, with what the united states considers genocide. ko pal law has been a soldier since he was 9, fighting for another karenni rebel force. last year, the myanmar military stormed through his village, burning and looting. an airstrike tore the roof off the church. one afternoon, mr. pal law, 29, surveyed the charred remains of his home, stepping carefully for fear of mines. he sipped a jug of homemade alcohol, rice grains swollen in the fermented murk. the soldiers with him downed beers. deserters from the junta’s forces say synthetic drug use is rampant. for both sides in this grinding war, respite is sought in an altered state. image after leaving his destroyed village, on roads cratered by mine blasts, mr. pal law ordered the truck to stop for an impromptu target practice. he guzzled his moonshine. he lay on the red earth, aiming his rifle. not a single shot found its mark. “i like to fight,” he said, his words slurring. “i am good at fighting.” after so long in power, the myanmar military has infiltrated every crevice of the society and economy. in the borderlands, many ethnic armed groups hold similar sway. they collect taxes, and then when the myanmar army comes back, it collects its own. the people remain impoverished. in the resistance stronghold of demoso, where the roads into town are lined with refugee encampments, deputy commander maui phoe thaike presided over a baby naming ceremony for the son of a k.n.d.f. soldier. around him, men spoke of federal democracy and clutched assault rifles. one, a recent amputee, leaned on crutches. the militia’s top brass gathered around the newborn. the deputy commander cooed. the baby cooed back. “no, he will be a soldier,” deputy commander maui phoe thaike answered. “he will be a man and fight.” image hannah beech is a times reporter based in bangkok who has been covering asia for more than 25 years. she focuses on in depth and investigative stories.more about hannah beech save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time i comment. founded in 2011, south asia journal (saj) is a policy magazine focused on issues relating to south asia. bearing no political affiliation, the journal’s goal is to provide discerning, critical perspectives on the south asian sub continent and its evolving relationship to the broader world. saj aims to highlight emerging regional trends, especially issues which call for more emphasis among decision makers and policy framers. contact us: [email protected] © south asia journal

myanmar’s 2021 coup looks to have backfired spectacularly. a determined youth resistance is fighting tooth and nail against military dictatorship   and winning. when myanmar’s military coup took place on february 1, 2021, few thought it would turn out this way. rarely has a military in southeast asia staged a successful coup and then failed to consolidate power afterwards. yet this is precisely what is happening in myanmar, the predominantly buddhist nation also known as burma. a fierce and determined coalition of resistance forces are in the process of prevailing over myanmar’s battle hardened army. although there have been failed coups in southeast asia   in the philippines and thailand in the 1980s and cambodia in 1997   once a putsch is successfully executed, there is usually no looking back. indonesia’s coup in 1965 and the 13 successful military seizures of power in thailand since 1932 fall in this category, with juntas holding on to power post coup. yet myanmar is proving to be an extraordinary exception. after nearly 50 years of military dictatorship since 1962, and a decade of political liberalization, economic reform and development progress between 2011 and 2021, the people of myanmar have put their lives on the line for a future no longer ruled under the generals’ boots. in reaction to the 2021 coup, led by senior general min aung hlaing, a combined force of local youths, ethnic armies, civilian leaders and a defiant population have fought back in a deadly civil war to regain the democratic system that underpinned a better and more promising future. scoring a growing number of battlefield victories in recent months, the resistance forces behind what they now call a “revolution” have turned the tide in the civil war. as myanmar’s military dictatorship now appears untenable, the country’s future will soon hang in the balance. to secure a democratic future, the country needs a stakeholder dialogue at home and engagement from the international community and regional players, particularly the association of southeast asian nations, or asean. defeating the military is one thing, but putting together a viable pluralistic state with popular legitimacy in an ethnically fractious nation   an aspiring “federal democratic union”   will prove difficult and existentially daunting. myanmar’s grinding and virulent internal conflict could also drag on for more months as the generals hold out in major towns, such as the capital of naypyidaw and yangon, relying on air power, armor and artillery to last as long as they can. but the numbers are stacked against the junta, the self styled state administration council (sac). once a formidable 500,000 strong armed force, myanmar’s military today is estimated at around 150,000 or fewer, overstretched across towns and regions in the country of 55 million people. three fifths of the population are burmese, the rest myriad ethnic minorities led by the shans and the karens. widely known as one of the most battle tested militaries in the world for having fought countless conflicts over the decades against ethnic armies resisting central authority and seeking autonomy, the country’s military picked the wrong fight this time. following the coup, myanmar soldiers turned their guns on their own people in a murderous campaign to subdue anti military street demonstrations initially led by the civil disobedience movement. as troops killed hundreds of ordinary burmese indiscriminately in subsequent weeks, popular anger boiled up. the catalyst was myanmar’s youth in towns across the country, who rose up and fought back. unlike their forebears, who tolerated half a century of military rule, the country’s teenagers and 20 somethings of today grew up during a decade of openness and possibilities, with improved standards of living and rising expectations. organized into people’s defense force (pdf) units nationwide, these brave youths first took up homemade arms and whatever rudimentary weapons they could muster to fight back against soldiers, stealing small weapons in the process. they later lined up with and received arms and training from the ethnic armies, formally known as the ethnic armed organizations (eao). the eaos and pdf squads operate in coordination with the umbrella civilian led national unity government (nug). using guerrilla tactics as well as conventional warfare, the resistance forces have taken the military to task and achieved at least a stalemate on the battlefields. support for the resistance grew as military brutality and outright barbarism provoked a popular revolt, whereby the vast majority of the population, regardless of ethnic backgrounds, turned against the ruling generals. more recently, after being attacked left and right, up and down the country, the military lacked recruits, reinforcements and supplies, and faced deteriorating morale. it was a matter of time until it would reach a point of no return. that point came late last year with “operation 1027” under the so called “three brotherhood alliance” consisting of the myanmar national democratic alliance army, ta’ang national liberation army and arakan army. their coordinated offensive in northern shan state bordering china succeeded in seizing two dozen towns and hundreds of military outposts, assisted by other eaos and resistance columns in the myanmar heartland. the october 27 operation was a breakthrough in self belief and battlefield reality. in addition to the resistance’s offensive in shan state, anti junta forces in karenni state next to the thai border in november won similar battles in a campaign known as “operation 1111.” however the military tries to fight back, it appears the junta will not be able to prevail. the resistance forces are poised for an eventual triumph despite the military’s mobilization campaign through a new conscription law and recourse to air power. although the resistance is likely to win its revolution by overthrowing the military dictatorship, it still has a long way to go. the eaos are motley and traditional adversaries among themselves and against central authority, while the pdf youths lack experience in shaping what comes next. meanwhile, the nug remains inchoate and devoid of clear and convincing leadership. one half of the fight is to kick out gen. min aung hlaing, his cohorts and sac cronies. the other and more important half is to convert and build the revolution into a workable compromise system of governance. the goal would be power sharing in the spirit of the 2011 21 period that was led by the reform minded gen. thein sein and the democracy icon   though politically spent   aung san suu kyi. ultimately what can emerge is a fractured but still intact country with a reduced central government and autonomous statelets, such as rakhine, shan and karen, which may agree at most to a confederation arrangement. winning the civil war but letting the peace degenerate into renewed ethnic conflicts, unfulfilled expectations and a potential breakup of myanmar into autonomous statelets harboring drugs and crimes would be detrimental not just for the local population but also to the regional neighborhood and international community. to date, asean has been ineffectual and divided over myanmar, but it now has a second chance to get on the right track by engaging the nug, eaos and even military elements beyond gen min aung hlaing and the sac. thailand, under the newly elected government of prime minister srettha thavisin, is intent on playing a leading regional role and has begun to engage all major stakeholders. what’s happened to myanmar’s coup and autocratic rule is instructive. myanmar is a case not of democratic rollback but of autocratic reversal, and it stands out for its aspirants of liberty putting down an autocratic imposition by force. this does not mean, however, that the country by default will recover and proceed into a vibrant democracy of any sort. the decade of freedom and self determination that earlier prevailed was, in fact, fragile, precarious and contingent on a civil military compromise. moving forward, compromises will be the key to myanmar’s future cohesiveness and viability. there are multiple worst case types of scenarios for myanmar, and all are possible. one is that once the sac junta collapses or when gen. min aung hlaing is ousted   whichever comes first   the resistance forces will turn on themselves. there is longstanding animosity and mistrust between the eaos and the majority burmese, who have been running the central government since postwar independence. the eaos could carve out smaller autonomous states of their own with disregard for any central government. another undesirable outcome would be the emergence of fresh internal conflicts among the eaos themselves, or between some of the eaos and what’s left of the military. yet still another possible worst case would be an nug aligned with pdf fighters battling some of the ethnic armies for control of the country. in short, the country we used to know prior to the coup will never be the same again. the best outcome would be a negotiated settlement among key stakeholders, ranging from the nug and pdf leaders to the more powerful eaos, perhaps with mediation and facilitation from asean, particularly thailand. myanmar’s future is one rare issue the united states and china can agree on   neither will want to see a disintegrated and balkanized myanmar which becomes a cesspool of drugs and crimes. if asean, with thailand in the lead, together with major external players from china and the u.s. to india and the broader international community, can broker a series of closed door discussions about the country’s future political system and governance, the joint effort could lead to a new deal whereby myanmar can still emerge as a country with greater autonomy for some of the ethnic areas. the most likely scenario combines these elements. it posits that the ongoing civil war may drag on for months as the sac uses asymmetric air power to fight rearguard actions and cling on to the seat of power in the capital of naypyidaw. yet eventually the sac will succumb one way or another to the resistance. ultimately what can emerge is a fractured but still intact country with a reduced central government and autonomous statelets, such as rakhine, shan and karen, which may agree at most to a confederation arrangement. it would form a myanmar with mini states within. this can still be workable for the international community if the right mix of negotiations, compromises, and agreements are found and put in place. for industry specific scenarios and bespoke geopolitical intelligence, contact us and we will provide you with more information about our advisory services. receive insights from our experts every week in your inbox. information about what personal data we collect about you and how we process it (including information about how we personalize our website for you and deliver content tailored to you) can be found in our privacy policy. show all reports view this report on the web:https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/revolution myanmar/ report published:may 16, 2024 document version/created:february 8, 2025
transcript this transcript was created using speech recognition software. while it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. from “the new york times,” i’m katrin bennhold. this is “the daily.” [theme music] myanmar is home to one of the deadliest, most intractable civil wars on the planet, but something new and remarkable is happening. an unusual wave of young people from the cities, including students, poets, baristas, have joined the country’s rebel militias. this coalition is now making startling gains against myanmar’s military dictatorship. today, my colleague hannah beech takes us inside this surprising resistance movement. [upbeat music] it’s monday, june 24. hannah, you’ve been covering a war that is barely getting any attention in the world. we hear a lot about gaza in ukraine, but you’ve been covering this war in myanmar. and now three years in, something is shifting in a really unexpected way. tell us what’s happening. i think when we imagine a civil war in southeast asia, we expect, i don’t know, guerrillas in combat fatigues fighting in the jungle. and yes, you do have those g time rebel fighters, but what’s happening now is that these veteran soldiers have partnered with the new and exciting force, which is young people from the cities who have joined together with these old guys, and they’ve decided to fight the good fight for an ideal called democracy. and remarkably, three years after the civil war began, they’re starting to win. wow. and just for context, remind us how this war started. where are we in this story?