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A journey from the Chin hills to the Sagaing plains with arms dealers and rebel commanders reveals the turmoil of Myanmar’s civil war – and the steep price of victory.
By IVAN OGILVIE | FRONTIER
The change in mood was as abrupt as the ending of the Chin mountains, which fell suddenly into the flat rice paddies of Sagaing Region.
It was February 6. I’d just spent two weeks in the relative safety of Chin State, where the rugged terrain provided some protection, but now I was heading down to the volatile flatlands of Sagaing to meet with more resistance groups.
Various 4×4 vehicles sped past me carrying heavily armed soldiers along an open road, driving south towards Kalay town. These were not Myanmar military soldiers, but troops from a dizzying array of resistance groups.
A fierce battle has been raging for control of Kalay, which sits on the southwestern edge of Sagaing, near the four-way intersection of a major highway. Losing control of the road would cut the regime off from its remaining camps in the Chin mountains as well as crucial border routes to India.
Sagaing emerged as a hotbed of resistance soon after the 2021 military coup, with Kalay in particular becoming emblematic of the political crisis. As the regime’s response to mass peaceful demonstrations grew increasingly violent, protesters in Kalay barricaded themselves in a fortified camp that they defended with homemade hunting rifles.
Sagaing hadn’t experienced conflict in decades, but since the coup has seen more shocking atrocities than anywhere else. The violence I’d heard about was reflected in the number of amputees I saw over just three days.
While in Chin, I’d mostly spent time with the Zomi Federal Union, which has close ties to some resistance groups operating in Kalay Township, and they wanted to show me the site of a recent junta airstrike on a village called Kanan, in neighbouring Tamu Township.
A senior ZFU officer named William escorted me down a bumpy back road from Chin, avoiding the main highway. We had stopped at a road side shop perched on a ridge when William asked, to my surprise, if I’d like to see an RPG.
“We make the RPGs in Chin State,” said William, a preacher turned rebel commander. “We have a factory, and we sell them to our friends to help them. In exchange they give us other things we need like guns.”
It turned out our trip was also an opportunity to buy and sell some weapons. After coming down from the mountains, we arrived at Letpanchaung village, roughly 15 kilometres north of Kalay town.
The villages we passed in Kalay were set on a flat plain, with orderly rows of detached houses made from a mix of concrete, bamboo and thatch. I’d been in Myanmar for several weeks, but had seen nothing except for traditional wooden Chin houses, in what had felt like a different country altogether.
The mountains act as a natural border between the Bamar lowlands and the Chin highlands, which stretch from Myanmar across India and into the hill tracts of Bangladesh. The Chin are ethnically, religiously and geographically separate from the Bamar, and now that Chin has been largely liberated from military rule, the majestic wall of the Chin mountain range takes on an even deeper meaning.
The KIA connection
In Letpanchaung, we headed to the home of a small, incredibly friendly arms dealer, joining officers from the Kalay People’s Defence Force and the Chin-based PDF Zoland, Mindat Chinland Defence Force and Chin National Defence Force. They all sat together drinking whiskey and playing Carrom, a tabletop game common across South Asia, while armed guards stood at attention.
“We haven’t seen each other in a year,” said one of the Kalay PDF officers, who agreed to speak to me after a few drinks, on the condition that he remained anonymous.
“We’ve been away on different training programmes with the Kachin Independence Army and involved in different operations. We’ve been training in urban warfare. Our fight is in the urban areas.”
As the whiskey flowed, automatic rifles were also passed around, and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands.
My new friend told me the Kalay PDF operates under Command 1, a joint command structure between the KIA, which has fought for autonomy for the Kachin people for decades, and the National Unity Government, a parallel administration appointed by elected lawmakers deposed in the coup.
PDFs are officially under the authority of the NUG, but in practice operate with a large degree of autonomy, and there are also many resistance groups in Sagaing and Chin with no relationship to the NUG.
However, the Kalay PDF officer said even many of these receive weapons and training from the KIA. Others are more reliant on other major ethnic armed groups. The PDF Zoland, Mindat CDF and CNDF for example are all members of the Chin Brotherhood Alliance, which is supported by the Arakan Army.
“The KIA have their own people here in Sagaing. They provide the training and the arms and we operate under them. They are our commanders,” the Kalay PDF officer said, adding he attended military training at the KIA headquarters in Laiza, on the Chinese border with Kachin State.
I asked him whether he had any worries for the future, and he mentioned the broad militarisation of Myanmar’s youth, a concern shared by many I spoke to on my journey. An entire generation is being taught to settle disputes with the barrel of a gun, which could have ramifications lasting far beyond the current conflict.
“Everyone has a gun now. We’re all together at the moment under KIA command, but in the future who knows what will happen,” he said.
After our chat, in full tactical gear and carrying heavy weaponry, the fighters jumped onto the back of motorbikes and headed off into the night. As the sound of the engines faded in the distance, I heard the first mortars going off from the frontlines at Kalay.
“PDF and SAC fighting,” William told me with a chuckle, referring to the military regime by its official name, the State Administration Council. “We fight at night.”
Letpanchaung is now “in the hands of the revolution,” William told me when we woke up the next morning, and the freedom with which I was able to move around surprised me. We walked around the corner to a tea shop for breakfast – mohinga, kyaw zayn and samosas.
Despite lying on the other side of the mountain range, in some ways Letpanchaung is like an outpost of Chin. Many of the people here are ethnic Chin and devout Christians, and the stability here is more reminiscent of the territorial control in Chin than the usual guerrilla warfare and shifting front lines in central Sagaing.
After breakfast we headed to a Kalay PDF outpost, where some young men in their early 20s were sitting smoking high-quality weed. One, in the corner, had a metal contraption holding his leg together.
“Before the coup I was an engineering student,” said the Kalay PDF squad leader Ko Min Htin Maung Maung, who sat casually cross-legged with an AK47 resting on his shoulder. The 22-year-old said he joined the resistance three years ago, after witnessing military crackdowns on protesters.
“When I witnessed these atrocities against civilians, I felt great pain and anger. We can’t accept these violent acts against the people,” he said. Like the other Kalay PDF officer I spoke to the night before, he said he and his comrades received basic military training from the KIA under Command 1.
While the military capabilities of these grassroots resistance groups have developed substantially in a short period of time, their limitations are still apparent.
“In terms of tactics and strategy, we learn from watching YouTube videos, and try to put them into practice when we can,” Min Htin Maung Maung said.
The squad only had two guns – one purchased in India and another captured from the military. PDF groups across the country routinely also use improvised weapons, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Ko Maung Kaung, the young injured man I’d noticed earlier, is a testament to that.
“It was an accident,” he explained. “I was trying to plant a bomb in an SAC camp. The SAC and their allied militiamen were coming towards us when we were planting the bomb, and it just exploded,” he told me in a voice full of regret.
A large chunk of his leg was blown away, while both his arms had been amputated just below the wrists.
The price of victory
We continued our journey via backroads towards Kanan, a majority Chin and Christian village, roughly 80km north of Kalay, which sits on the Chin-Sagaing-India border. The now abandoned village has become a symbol of the military’s cruelty and the double-edged sword of resistance victories – which are often brutally punished.
According to an Amnesty International report, after the village was seized by the resistance, the PDF planned a ceremony at the local school on January 7. That same day, before it could be held, the military bombed the school and a nearby church. The airstrikes killed 17 civilians, including nine children, with Amnesty saying there were no PDF fighters present at the time of the attack.
But first we stopped at Khampat, a town in Tamu that was seized by the resistance but similarly had to be abandoned following regime airstrikes. The town had a post-apocalyptic feel, as bored young resistance soldiers took potshots at the ruins of bombed out buildings.
“In the first Khampat battle, we took the junta camp, but they launched a counter offensive and re-took it from us. We fought them several times and later surrounded their base and took control of the town,” said Jude Thang Lian Mang, acting commander of the Thadou Defence Army. The Thadou are a Chin subgroup who, like other Chin groups, live in the borderlands of Myanmar, Bangladesh and India.
Once we arrived in Kanan, Ngam Neo, another TDA member, explained what happened the day of the airstrike while we walked through the ruins of the school.
“You see this? They don’t care where they target. They bomb everywhere.” The pain on his face was visible as we stood in the rubble of what used to be a classroom.
The Myanmar military has increasingly relied on airstrikes as it loses ground across the country. Amnesty has called for an investigation into the Kanan bombing and other potential war crimes.
“These kinds of attacks have become tragically routine in Myanmar,” said Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher, Mr Joe Freeman. “The Myanmar military has a track record of indiscriminate air strikes in which very little attempt appears to be made to distinguish between combatants and civilians. In some cases collective punishment appears to be the point.”
A small thatched hut has since been converted into a makeshift classroom, guarded by men carrying automatic weapons, which didn’t seem to faze any of the children. William pointed out another bomb crater that sat where six houses used to be. All that was left were mangled wooden frames standing amid piles of rubble. A spiral staircase lay on the side of the road as young boys played in the debris.
At a nearby church, a service was taking place to commemorate two victims of the attack. The family generously allowed us to film for a few moments before we left them to grieve for their loved ones.
On our way back to Letpanchaung, we stopped for lunch at a small tea shop, where we were warmly greeted by other armed Kalay PDF soldiers who sat drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. But in an indication of how varied the resistance landscape is, the mood changed when 20 troops from an unknown outfit entered the restaurant.
The leader of the pack had one arm amputated under his elbow and wore camo trousers with a black T-shirt and a high-tech military helmet. He shouted as he walked in, holding a bottle of beer in his good hand. I asked William who they were.
“We don’t know them,” he answered, in a tone that suggested I should leave it at that.
Back at the arms dealer’s house in Letpanchaung, the real business that we’d come for got underway. A large artillery gun was now on display in the middle of the living room, while automatic weapons were being cleaned and assembled outside on the terrace.
Many of the guns were brought in from India through the border states of Mizoram, Manipur and Nagaland, all of which host large networks of organised criminal gangs.
It wasn’t long before everyone was drinking whiskey again, while loud music drowned out the dull thud of mortars falling around Kalay.
“I never drank anything before,” said William, who was a preacher before the coup. “Nobody did before the revolution. Now everyone does.”
I asked William about his own story, which he’d so far been reluctant to share with me. Maybe the whiskey loosened him up, because he lifted his shirt to reveal four bullet wounds stretching up the side of his torso from his hip to his ribs.
“I was shot by the SAC as I tried to flee to India,” he said, without offering more details. “One of the bullets is still inside. I can’t fly on airplanes.”