100,000 killed in Myanmar post-coup strife
More than 100,000 people have been killed across all sides in Myanmar since a military coup five years ago triggered civil war, a conflict monitor said on Wednesday.
The military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, detaining the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and ending Myanmar’s decadelong experiment with democracy.
Antiputsch protests were put down by security forces, but activists quit the cities to form prodemocracy guerrilla groups, fighting alongside ethnic minority armies which have long resisted central rule.
Since the coup there have been 100,114 conflict-related fatalities, according to latest data from monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (Acled), which tallies media reports of violence.
There is no official toll and estimates vary widely, but analysts regard the half-decade civil war as Asia’s deadliest active conflict.
More than 3.7 million people are internally displaced in Myanmar, according to the United Nations, and more one in five people face acute food insecurity amid a national backslide into poverty.
In the largest city, Yangon, violence can take the form of occasional assassinations.
Far-reaching consequences
Other places are riven by entrenched warfare or pounded by daily airstrikes by the military’s Russian- and Chinese-supplied jets.
Myanmar was the second most conflict-hit nation in the world last year, according to Acled, behind only the Palestinian territories.
Acled has registered more than 1,200 distinct armed groups in the civil war, calling it “the most fragmented conflict in the world.”
A combined offensive among some rebels starting late 2023 saw them win stunning advances, bearing down on the second largest city Mandalay—with speculation they may even capture the ancient royal capital.
But the tide has turned back in favor of the military, analysts say, after China threw support behind it and Beijing-backed truces were signed with two of the most powerful ethnic minority armies.
In February 2024, the military activated conscription legislation, aiming to bolster its ranks by forcibly recruiting 50,000 citizens.
The war has also had far-reaching consequences abroad, filling camps in neighboring Thailand and Bangladesh with an exodus of refugees, and creating fertile ground for transnational criminal enterprise.
Armed groups on all sides fill their war chests with profits from the booming production of drugs such as heroin and methamphetamine, monitors say.
Meanwhile Myanmar’s loosely governed borderlands have become a hotbed for online scam centers often operating out of fortified compounds guarded by militants.
