Myanmar rebels limb in DIY weapons factories

Under an awning in a bamboo thicket in northern Myanmar, an anti-coup fighter following instructions from YouTube welds scavenged steel into crude mortar rounds and shells to be fired at junta troops.

Almost two years after seizing power, the military has been unable to crush local militias that have sprung up to fight the putsch with hit-and-run tactics.

In turn, these People's Defence Forces (PDF) remain massively outgunned by the military's artillery strikes, Chinese and Russian-made jets and Israeli-patterned rifles.

Captured weapons and expensive purchases on the black market have provided patchy boosts to PDF firepower, analysts say, but many militias have turned to risky trial-and-error operations to churn out their own rockets, mines and mortars.

"We just learn how to build weapons from the internet or YouTube," said Nay Min, an anti-coup fighter from the northern Sagaing region.

"We search how to cook saltpetre (potassium nitrate), how to combine it to get gunpowder, how to build rifles. We haven't received any training," he told AFP.

Those with engineering or mechanical backgrounds, like his comrade Nay Myo Win, experiment and come up with prototypes or copies of captured weapons, he said.

Blowtorches in hand, they sweat for hours in makeshift workshops powered by generators that are frequent targets of junta raids.

Nay Myo Win mixes saltpetre to make the gunpowder needed to fire mortar shells filled with lead and scrap metal that he claims have a range of just over two kilometres (1.2 miles).

Laid out on a tarpaulin ahead of a mission in October, the mortars are unimpressive-little more than construction pipes welded to bipods.

The shells require two charges to detonate-one to fire the shell and the other to explode on impact-a method first used at the beginning of the 20th century.