Bangkok — Armed groups in Myanmar fighting the country’s military regime are making major, even “historic,” gains in the northeast since the breakdown of a cease-fire in June, experts tell VOA, setting up a possible push toward Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city.
The centerpiece of the groups’ recent string of wins was the taking last weekend of Lashio, the headquarters of the Myanmar military’s northeast regional command, in Shan State.
Lashio anchors one of 14 regional commands across the country and is the first to fall to resistance groups since the military seized power from a democratically elected government in February 2021, setting off a bloody civil war.
With a population of some 150,000, it is also the largest city the military has lost and straddles the main highway between Mandalay and Myanmar’s border with China, a key trade route.
“It’s just a massive, historic achievement for the resistance, something that hasn’t been seen before … so, it will have a lot of ramifications,” said Matthew Arnold, an independent Myanmar analyst tracking the fighting.
Of the 14 regional command bases, he said, Lashio was among the most heavily fortified and defended.
“This was a massive, massive garrison, with layers of defense,” Arnold said. “If they can’t keep Lashio, it starts to open up lots of other questions about what they can keep.”
Cease-fire collapsed
The rebel advance is part of Operation 10-27, for October 27, the date last year that a trio of ethnic minority armed groups based in Shan — the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, Ta’ang National Liberation Army and Arakan Army — launched a coordinated offensive against the junta.
After sweeping across much of northern Shan in a few months, the so-called Three Brotherhood Alliance agreed to a cease-fire brokered by China in January but has been back on the offensive since the truce collapsed in June.
Jason Tower, Myanmar program director for the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S. government-funded think tank, estimates the alliance has seized at least another 12,000 square kilometers (about 4,630 square miles) since then, an area greater than all of Jamaica.
He says its latest push has seen more cooperation between the ethnic armed groups, which have been around for decades, and the People’s Defense Forces, local community militias that have sprung up across Myanmar to resist the junta.
Tower said the first phase of 10-27 saw some collaboration, but less coordination between the two.
“But now, for phase two, you see where the TNLA is very publicly working with the Mandalay PDF, and operations are going on down in Mandalay Region,” he said.
“That alliance is quite significant and also sends a sign … that you could well see a much more robust type of relationship begin to emerge between the Brotherhood and the PDFs.”
That cooperation and coordination was on show in Lashio, where hundreds of PDF and other fighters helped the MNDAA seize control, said Ye Myo Hein, a senior adviser at the USIP and a global fellow at the Wilson Center, another Washington think tank.
By taking Lashio, he said, the groups have proven their ability to wage and win in conventional urban warfare in what has been a largely rural armed resistance movement using mostly guerrilla tactics.
“Resistance forces have demonstrated their ability to defeat junta troops even in conventional warfare, advancing toward key cities like Mandalay. If the resistance succeeds in gaining ground in major cities such as Mandalay in the upcoming wave of operations, the regime will find it exceedingly difficult to maintain control in Naypyidaw and Yangon in 2025,” said Ye Myo Hein.
Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, and Yangon, its largest city, remain firmly in the junta’s hands.
The TNLA and Mandalay PDF have each claimed victories in recent weeks in towns inching ever closer to Mandalay, though. That includes Mogok, the source of the world’s most-prized rubies, landing another financial blow against a junta already hit hard by international sanctions.
A spokesperson for the regime could not be reached for comment.
In a rare move, junta leader Min Aung Hlaing on Tuesday admitted the military was under pressure in Shan in a televised address on state media. He accused “foreign technology experts” of aiding its enemies.
The general’s remarks were widely seen as a stab at China. Myanmar’s giant neighbor has been one of the military’s main weapons suppliers. But it is also widely believed to be aiding some ethnic armed groups, which have in turn been helping arm and train some of the PDFs.
‘What does the junta lose next?’
Despite a broadly unpopular conscription drive started earlier this year to shore up the military’s dwindling ranks, the analysts say the momentum in the war is squarely with the resistance.
“The question is, what does the junta lose next, and overall, how does it stem the momentum of the resistance? And I think for everybody across the resistance, they can sense that the junta is … gravely weakening,” said Arnold.
“It just doesn’t have experienced, combat-proven units that it can maneuver to launch counteroffensives, so what it tries to do is pump in fresh conscripts,” he said. “It’s just not an adequate response.”
Since the coup, resistance groups have been pushing the junta farther and farther away from the country’s borders and inching closer to its strongholds in the center.
The fighting has come at a grave cost. More than 5,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed, on top of tens of thousands of fighters on both sides. The United Nations says more than 2.8 million have been displaced.
Seeing the junta’s latest run of losses in Shan, the analysts say, resistance groups elsewhere across Myanmar are likely to try to push the military a bit harder, and the Brotherhood’s successful siege of Lashio could give them some valuable lessons on how to take other well-fortified positions.
“I think across the country you’re going to see more waves … by both ethnic armed organizations and other PDFs to try their own hand against the Myanmar military given that they have seen just how readily people are surrendering and how easy it’s been for the Brotherhood to finish off this operation,” said Tower.
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