A ragtag resistance sees the tide turning in a forgotten war

The night Suu Kyi thought she would die of her wounds on the front lines of a forgotten war, a crescent moon hung overhead. A pendant of the Virgin Mary dangled around her neck. Maybe those augurs saved her. Or maybe, she said, it was not yet time for her to die.

“When I joined the revolution, I knew my chances of surviving were 50-50,” Suu Kyi, 21, said of her decision to enlist as a rebel soldier, fighting to overthrow the junta that returned Myanmar to military dictatorship three years ago. “I’m an ordinary girl, an ordinary young person. I believe in federal democracy and human rights.”

Suu Kyi said the words “federal democracy” in English. There are no easy words for the concept in Burmese.

Since the junta in Myanmar staged its coup in February 2021, ending a brief period of democratic reform and training its guns once again on peaceful protesters, much of the country has turned against the military. A new generation, which came of age during the civilian administration of the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu

Kyi, has taken to arms, joining rebels who have opposed military dictatorship for decades.

Now, after three years of desperate resistance, the battle lines are changing fast. The rebels have overrun scores of military bases and taken over dozens of towns. The tempo of victory has quickened in recent days, and antijunta forces now claim to control more than half of Myanmar’s territory, from lowland jungles to the foothills of the Himalayas.

Much of the fighting’s rhythm seems syncopated to that of another century: trenches dug into unrelenting mud, the slide of flip-flops down monsoonsoaked hills, the clatter of homemade AK-style assault rifles in dusty towns. The junta’s multiple rocket launchers and fighter jets may bring a modern touch to the killing, as does the hovering of the resistance’s battle drones. But this conflict, with its hand-to-hand combat and profusion of land mines, feels like a throwback to the kind of civil war that was documented in black and white.

If they manage to push into the nation’s heartland – no sure thing – the insurgents could unseat a military that has, in one form or another, kept Myanmar in its grip for more than half a century. The result may be not so much a shifting of power as a shattering of a nation, its vast periphery breaking permanently away from central control.

“We want liberation from the Myanmar army,” Suu Kyi said. “I am willing to sacrifice myself for that.”

Suu Kyi’s militia is called the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, or KNDF. Claiming more than 8,000 soldiers, it is an umbrella organization for bands of armed youth in Karenni, Myanmar’s smallest state and the site of some of the most intense fighting. Its frontline strategist, Deputy Cmdr. Maui Phoe Thaike, is an environmentalist who studied at the University of Montana at Missoula.

The KNDF and its allied militias could soon control all of Karenni, making it the first state in Myanmar to break free from junta control, military analysts say. In a series of nationwide offensives starting last fall, insurgents have repelled the junta from large swaths of Myanmar’s north, west and east. This month, guerrillas captured a major trading town on the border with Thailand. Naypyitaw, the capital of Myanmar built by the junta as a defensive fortress, is less than 150 miles from Karenni.