Myanmar Rebels Gain Regional Military Base in Lashio, a Major Win
A rebel army in Myanmar announced this weekend that it had overrun a regional military base near the border with China in what is likely to be the most significant victory yet for a patchwork of resistance groups that have challenged the country’s junta.
On Monday, Myanmar’s military rulers signaled that the insurgents had, in fact, made a major advance, saying the junta had lost contact with the base, the northeastern command in the city of Lashio in Shan State.
The junta leader, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, said in a speech later Monday that security forces had withdrawn in northern Shan State because they were “prioritizing the safety of the people.” He said the rebels were getting weapons and other supplies, including drones and short-range missiles, from “foreign countries,” which he didn’t identify. Some arms and ammunition were coming from factories just across the China-Myanmar border, he said.
“We need to investigate where these factories are getting their funds and technological support from,” the military leader said.
The junta has been on the defensive for months as a broad alliance of rebel militias and pro-democracy groups has made inroads across large swaths of the country. Suffering repeated losses of territory and troops, the junta in recent months has imposed a mandatory draft.
It wasn’t immediately clear how the latest development would ricochet in the wider civil war. But the fall of a regional military headquarters — one of 14 in Myanmar and home to thousands of government soldiers — would be a major defeat for the junta, which has been on a war footing for decades. It would also give the rebels control of Lashio, a strategic city, and its airport.
The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army claimed the victory after weeks of combat. On Saturday, the group’s fighters, who are from the Kokang ethnic Chinese minority, posted photos of themselves at the gates of the base. The group also claimed that it had in its custody three senior officers, all generals from the base.
“Senior officers closely supervised and participated in the fighting until 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 3, but contact was lost thereafter,” Zaw Min Tun, the military spokesman, said in an announcement on Monday. “Unconfirmed reports indicate that some senior officers have been captured.”
The commander of the base had reportedly fled to China, and the Kokang group said more than 4,000 troops and their families had surrendered. Those claims that could not be immediately verified.
It would be a historic loss for the Myanmar military, said Khin Zaw Win, a political analyst and director of the Tampadipa Institute, a think tank in Yangon. He added, “This is a crucial military area for the Myanmar military.”
The city of Lashio and its airport lie on a crucial trade corridor to Yunnan Province in China, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a high-speed rail link and other infrastructure projects on both sides of the border.
Beijing expressed support for the Myanmar junta after the country’s coup in February 2021 and has tried to mediate between the junta and the rebels. But analysts believe that the rebel advance in Lashio, as well as earlier offensives in the border region, would not have gone ahead without China’s approval.
“China has little interest in democracy in Myanmar,” Jason Tower, the Myanmar director at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan research organization, wrote in an analysis last week. He added: “Beijing is also unconcerned about furthering a broader peace: Its so-called mediation efforts center only on manipulating a subset of actors in the conflict to protect Chinese investments and weakening the military’s influence in the strategic borderlands to expand China’s.”
The Myanmar junta is now seeking military assistance from another authoritarian state, Russia. Casting the rebels as terrorists, U Khin Yi, the chairman of the Union Solidarity and Development Party, a junta ally, made the plea to Moscow in an interview with a Russian state-owned news outlet on Sunday.
The resistance now holds roughly 75 cities and towns across Myanmar and two airports, one in Thandwe in Rakhine State in the west, and the other in Lashio.
Last week’s gains in Lashio were symbolic for another reason: The offensive that started last year and is credited with putting the junta on the defensive also began in Shan.
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