Hannah Beech
Daniel Berehulak
Hannah Beech and Daniel Berehulak spent nearly a week with rebel forces in Anyar, a devastated interior region of Myanmar.
From a lonely hilltop in Myanmar, an unlikely commander peered at the enemy on the next crest. He squinted through dust-covered glasses. As the wind whipped up dry earth, Dr. Lone Lone, a rebel leader of five years’ vintage, swallowed a cough, then emitted a slight wheeze.
His men saluted. Their bearing was impeccable, even if their weaponry was not.
Throughout Myanmar’s heartland, where a civil war rages fierce and forgotten, rebel groups are outgunned and undermanned. The civilians who support them face unrelenting raids by the military, which abruptly ended a brief period of electoral governance with a coup in 2021. Myanmar’s generals returned the country to full army dictatorship, fractured the nation and ignited a humanitarian crisis.
Far from the spotlight fixed on Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and other global conflicts, Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation of about 50 million people, has quietly collapsed.
Recently, The New York Times photographer Daniel Berehulak and I traveled with Dr. Lone Lone to a rebel-held region. It was in Anyar, a part of central Myanmar where the rebels say no foreign journalists had gone since the military toppled the civilian government and erased political and economic reforms.
A rebel soldier — a boy, really — pointed to the sky where he had been told an armed drone was prowling. Over the previous three days, Dr. Lone Lone and a group of his men had evaded drones, fighter jets, attack helicopters and even paraglider pilots intent on chucking hand-held bombs at them. They had passed through villages that had been assaulted by howitzers or set on fire by the Myanmar military. A drone somewhere in the distance was not Dr. Lone Lone’s biggest concern.
Still, he urged us to retreat.
“I wish you could come to Myanmar without the bombs,” he said. “I love my country.”
After the 2021 coup, anti-military forces rose up and took control of more than half the country. Some of the rebel groups say they are fighting for Myanmar to become a federal democracy, with more rights for individual regions.
Rebel groups have worked with a government in exile to set up schools and hospitals in a series of disparate territories they call “Free Myanmar.” They hoped that these liberated zones would expand and merge until the military, which has kept Myanmar cowering since it first seized power from a democratically elected government in 1962, would be forced to relinquish control.
Anyar, in the nation’s arid central region, is one of the most formidable strongholds of armed resistance against the military. In the years since the coup, Daniel and I have reported from border regions where insurgencies by ethnic minorities have simmered for decades. While those zones endure frequent attacks by the Myanmar military, they also have supply lines to other countries. Arms and intelligence — and the occasional reporter — can enter.
By contrast, Anyar is marooned, even as it suffers the brunt of the military’s anger. The area is home to the nation’s Bamar ethnic majority and was historically the wellspring of support for the military, which is also predominantly Bamar. But the coup, which dragged the country back to a grimmer age, turned many people in Anyar against the military. The cost of this perceived disloyalty has been devastating.
Five years into the civil war, far from the reach of international aid groups, we found a heartland that felt lost in an apocalypse. From the skies above dusty villages and patchworks of farmland plowed by emaciated oxen, the Myanmar military’s instruments of death killed with chaotic impunity. In its isolation, Anyar suffers from crippling shortages, too, of weapons, guerrillas and, increasingly, hope.
To maintain his grip on power, U Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, stepped down as army chief in March so he could take the civilian post of president. He oversaw stage-managed elections in which the military’s proxy party was effectively the sole choice. (In April, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader he ousted, was transferred from prison to house arrest, according to the military.)
The same month that Mr. Min Aung Hlaing prepared to assume the presidency, human rights groups put the monthly civilian death toll in Myanmar at the highest mark since the coup. Nationwide, over the past five years, more than 90,000 civilians and combatants have been killed and 3.7 million people displaced, the United Nations says. Apart from the Palestinian territories, Myanmar was the most conflict-ridden place last year (although not the deadliest), according to the conflict monitor A.C.L.E.D.
Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, told me in an interview that airstrikes were ordered “because we got solid information” of legitimate military targets.
“That many people, civilian people, have been killed in airstrikes is just propaganda,” he said.
Death Along Dangerous Roads
At various stops along our route, bombs fell just before we arrived or just after we left — a measure of how common aerial assaults are in Anyar. Gyrocopters, a light helicopter-like craft, struck a village a couple miles away from where we were at one point. Drones dropped deadly payloads on a community where we had spent the night. We chased the contrails of fighter jets and stared into the sky looking for armed paragliders.
In March, about 240 Myanmar military airstrikes killed more than 400 people, many in Anyar, according to A.C.L.E.D. In mid-April, two gyrocopters attacked a village in Anyar’s Monywa Township, killing at least 17 people. During our time in central Myanmar, we confirmed at least nine killings of civilians that had not been recorded by rights groups. This daily drumbeat of death goes all but unnoticed by the outside world.
“Do foreigners know what is happening to us?” an Anyar resident named U San Nyaung asked me, as he swept rubble from the ruins of his home, which had been burned by Myanmar soldiers.
To reach the front line in Anyar, we traveled by night and by camouflage. It took us three days to traverse what would normally be about a three-hour drive. We went by car, motorcycle, boat and foot, on back roads, mountain paths, rivers and strips of highway that were less than half a mile from the front lines. Many places we visited in Anyar had almost no contact with the outside world because of military blackouts — no reliable cellphone signals, no internet.
Nearly 200 houses in Mr. San Nyaung’s village, which like most of the places we visited we are not naming for security reasons, had been destroyed by fire. Then bombs fell from overhead. Three people were killed by those detonations, including a Buddhist monk. The military had left one final surprise: land mines planted near homes and Buddhist temples, to ensure carnage after soldiers departed.
Mr. San Nyaung began weeping, his tears fat and true.
“I know about Ukraine, Gaza. I feel very sorry for them,” he said. “We share the same sadness.”
Stethoscopes to Guns
The roots of Myanmar’s civil war reach back to 1962, when a general grabbed power, claiming that the army was needed to prevent the country from fracturing amid incursions by ethnic militias. Those insurgencies, in which ethnic minorities demanded autonomy or even independence, have endured for decades, including one that is considered one of the world’s longest running ethnic revolts. But in this latest outbreak of civil war, the rebellion by the Bamar ethnic majority has spread the conflict nationwide.
“The army cannot accept that this time the Bamar are also against them,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “That’s why they are the most cruel to us.”
Dr. Lone Lone, 41, never intended to command a battalion of 120 soldiers. It wasn’t just his nearsightedness, asthma or chronic back pain that made his career as an armed rebel so unlikely. Born in an Anyar town famous for its working elephants, he studied medicine and then ran his own clinic.
In 2021, Dr. Lone Lone was about to go on a grand tour of Europe when the coup intervened and the junta imprisoned Myanmar’s elected leaders. Dr. Lone Lone joined in peaceful protests. But when the military cracked down, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters — including small children — with bullets to the head or heart, he escaped to a border region. There, ethnic militias gave basic training to white-collar urbanites like him.
“I was good at holding a stethoscope, not a gun,” Dr. Lone Lone said.
Still, Dr. Lone Lone commanded respect. He ran a medical corps before coaxing volunteers from his hometown to form a battalion of the People’s Defense Forces, a coalition of militias loosely organized under Myanmar’s government in exile. His soldiers told us about life in what they called the B.C. era — before the coup. One was in the second year of his college physics course. Another worked in marketing. Some of the fighters were teenagers when they took up arms. Two were still only 17 years old. The older soldiers had suspended normal life — date nights, marriage, children, harvests, beach holidays — for what they called “the revolution.”
Nevertheless, some B.C. habits endured. One soldier driving a pickup truck on dirt roads kept using his turn signal, though there was little reason for such politesse near the front line.
Dr. Lone Lone’s soldiers had come to this front line only a week before. In late December, a seven-month battle in northern Shan State ended with 15 rebel battalions, including Dr. Lone Lone’s, retreating. The Myanmar military buys its weapons from Russia and China, and the rebels have long given up hope that the West might finance their fight, as in Ukraine. Dr. Lone Lone’s fighters withdrew so fast they had to leave behind their treasured war elephants, a reminder of Myanmar’s martial past when pachyderms were drafted for duty.
“We have a lack of bullets,” Dr. Lone Lone said. “I feel depressed in our revolution because we do not have support from the United States and Europe, even though we are fighting for federal democracy.”
Myanmar’s generals, for their part, draw support from neighbors like China, India and Thailand, who are mostly interested in trying to keep instability and chaos from sloshing across their borders. Those countries tacitly backed the recent elections, which the United Nations dismissed as a “sham.”
Western investment in the country evaporated after the coup, and the generals rely on projects like a copper mine in central Myanmar, operated by a subsidiary of the Chinese state weapons manufacturer Norinco, to churn out cash. To protect those interests, the military has swept through nearby villages, burning and looting homes and bombing shelters for displaced people.
Ko Thu Rein, an Anyar guerrilla commander who used to work at the copper mine, said that the government in exile loosely coordinating the heartland forces had allocated only five rifles to his unit of 80 soldiers. (Using their own money, the men had managed to scrounge together 10 more.) His soldiers have fashioned mortar launchers out of bits of metal, but there are no mortar shells to fire.
A fighter jet tore through the sky. We tensed and waited to see if the Russian-made plane would circle back for a strike.
“This is my life forever,” Mr. Thu Rein said.
I couldn’t tell if he meant it in defiance, or in acceptance of his fate.
‘There Is Death Everywhere’
There was an airstrike last week, one the week before and another the week before that, the villagers said. There were others that went unmentioned. It was impossible to list them all. There were no more tears to shed, one woman we met at a restaurant said.
We sat eating bowls of noodles. The rebel-controlled village is a transport hub from which fuel and other supplies are disbursed to guerrilla forces. That is one reason the military has been devastating these villages.
Still, people need to eat. The noodles were good. Customers slurped broth as radios on tables squawked a barrage of intelligence. The bomb shelter was out back. It didn’t look large enough to fit all the diners.
I asked Daw Wah Wah, the noodle shop owner, if there had been any attacks over the past few days. She shook her head.
Then she remembered. Less than two miles away, there had been an airstrike. It had killed six people.
When was it, I asked?
“Yesterday,” she replied. “I forgot because there is death everywhere.”
The day before one of three election rounds, two fighter jets reached the village just after noon. Three gyrocopters followed. Ma Khin Moe Hnin, the owner of a fuel depot, kept on working. Then the bombs rained down. Her gas station was charred, as were a medical clinic, guesthouse and cafe where people hooked up to a Starlink satellite for internet access. Ten people were killed, including Ms. Khin Moe Hnin’s brother-in-law.
“I knew it would happen one day,” she said. “The bombs always fall.”
One evening, we were about to cross a river by boat — bridges were bombed too often to use — when a radio alerted us to armed paragliders drifting nearby. In the B.C. years, while in Bali for a medical conference, Dr. Lone Lone had seen paragliders float above the beach, their fabric wings bright against the blue sky. Now, he thought about the soldiers soaring through the inky night, holding bombs. Two officers who deserted from the military told me that paratroopers are considered expendable in a military that depends on conscription and drugs like methamphetamine to keep ranks filled.
We waited for a couple hours until the danger passed.
“The military is creative in one way,” Dr. Lone Lone said, his voice hushed in the dark. “They always find new ways to kill.”
Breaking Point
We kept on traveling through a terrorized heartland. A couple days after we visited the noodle shop, we bumped along back roads on motorcycles for six hours. There was dust in my mouth and deep in my ears. The driver of my motorcycle, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a grenade affixed to his belt, revved the engine. Suddenly, we saw a black sedan, strangely clean, stopped on the road. We stopped, too. Out of the car strode a man with a long beard and gray hair in a ponytail. He wore an army green T-shirt and a sarong, a revolver tucked by his waist. I had no idea who he was. I also had no idea where we were.
The man grinned and stuck out his hand.
“You can call me Brother Zero,” he said. “My unit is the Zero Guerrilla Force.”
Brother Zero, otherwise known as Ko Thet Gyi, operates out of rebel-held territory around Myingyan, close to Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. An artist, he took up arms after the coup. His wife, who was caught in junta-controlled territory, was sentenced to 25 years in prison because of her connection to him. Her face is tattooed on his arm.
At his camp, Mr. Thet Gyi pointed to a crater in the earth where a bomb had struck. Later we looked at another hole, larger and deeper. It was a prison for his soldiers who had tried to run away, Mr. Thet Gyi said. Five years of war, with little hope of respite, had driven up desertion rates.
“We don’t have many options,” he said. “We have to keep our soldiers.”
In February, an Anyar rebel commander who had bickered with other guerrilla leaders, surrendered to the Myanmar military. Soon afterward, precise attacks on Anyar’s resistance forces surged, presumably fed by intelligence provided by him.
In mid-March, after our trip to Anyar, the rebel fighters lost Tagaung, a strategic town that they had captured in 2024. Dr. Lone Lone’s men were forced to retreat from the hilltop front line we had visited. His battalion is now half the size it was when we met him. His deputy commander — who practically hugged me when I gave him a few sachets of Starbucks caramel latte, his favorite drink — has deserted. So has a former teacher who had told me earnestly that he had resigned himself to death if it meant eradicating the military-backed regime.
One evening during our reporting journey, I jolted awake in the back of a truck to find that we had stopped, waiting out another possible airstrike. Dr. Lone Lone grinned at me. He laughed a lot for a commander in what felt like a hopeless war. Then he stopped smiling.
“If I cannot win the revolution, then I will become a monk,” he told me. “I am trying to meditate always, but sometimes in this world, it is too difficult.”
