A people take to arms and fight for democracy. A military terrorizes civilians with airstrikes and land mines. Tens of thousands are killed. Millions are displaced.
Yet it is all happening almost completely out of view.
Recently, I spent a week on the front lines of a forgotten war in the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar. Since a military junta overthrew a civilian administration there three years ago, a head-spinning array of pro-democracy forces and ethnic militias have united to fight the generals. The resistance includes poets, doctors and lawyers who traded life in the cities for jungle warfare. It also includes veteran combatants who have known no occupation but soldier.
Now, for the first time, the rebels claim control of more than half of Myanmar’s territory. In recent weeks they have overrun dozens of towns and Myanmar military bases.
Today’s newsletter will explain how civil war has engulfed Myanmar — and why the world has ignored a country that less than a decade ago was lauded as a democratic success story.
A coup defied
In February 2021, a military junta, led by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, arrested the nation’s civilian leaders and returned the country to full dictatorship. If the generals expected the populace to cower in response to their coup, they were wrong. With military snipers shooting unarmed protesters and bystanders, including dozens of children, an armed resistance coalesced. Tens of thousands of professionals and members of Gen Z decamped to the jungle. Rappers, Buddhist monks and politicians, among others, learned how to shoot guns and arm drones. Their hands grew callused.
This unlikely resistance has repelled the junta’s forces from wide swaths of the country, including most of Myanmar’s borderlands. (Here are several useful charts that explain how the civil war is unfolding.)