Myanmar’s Resistance is Fracturing. Here’s What that Means

It was the summer of last year when three resistance fighters took a picture on the banks of the Irrawaddy river. On the opposite side, in the distance appears the city of Mandalay, the ancient capital of the burmese kingdoms and still considered the country’s cultural capital to this day. The message couldn’t have been clearer; we are close, and we are coming.

At the time a resistance offensive on Myanmar’s second largest city didn’t seem a far-fetched prospect. Mandalay already lay in ruins, destroyed by a devastating earthquake the previous March which killed thousands. Junta forces were largely absent from the epicenter of the disaster and during the relief effort - an indication, many thought, of their weakened presence in the city. They had already lost the entire region north of Mandalay in the months before. In short, the military regime seemed ready for collapse.

A year later the situation couldn’t be more different. In the months since that photo was taken on the banks of the Irrawaddy, Mandalay seems but a distant dream for the resistance. Their entire presence north of the city was diminished to a few isolated pockets; all major towns and roads are now firmly back under junta control. And Mandalay is not the only region where this has happened. Across the country, from Chin state in the west to Karenni in the east, and from Kachin in the far north to Tanintharyi in the far south, the junta has been on the offensive and achieved key victories.

As a result, the many resistance factions around the country are today on the backfoot, in what analysts are calling the most challenging period for the armed resistance since the 2021 coup. With setbacks on the battlefield, tensions between the different armed groups have also increased. Tensions which the junta has been eager to exploit.

The Spring Revolution’s Many Colors

Myanmar is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in Southeast Asia, and almost all of its ethnic groups have their own armed movement. Throughout the country’s long history of internal conflict these groups have at various times been at war with the government, entered ceasefires, signed peace agreements, or even been co-opted by the military. But when the military overthrew the civilian government in February 2021 and violently crushed an anti-coup protest movement, many of these factions picked up arms again and vowed this time to fight until the bitter end.

On top of these already existing ethnic armed organizations (commonly abbreviated as EAO), a new generation of resistance groups also came into being. Local armed cells, made up of anti-coup activists, students and farmers, these groups came to be known as the People’s defense Force (or PDF). The PDF was never a unified structure as much as it was a rallying banner for the anti-coup resistance that emerged among the ethnic Bamar majority of the country.

In the subsequent years, attempts were made to unify the wide array of resistance cells into a cohesive army. The National Unity Government (NUG), a civilian government formed out of the veteran lawmakers and other political dissidents, quickly set about tying the different groups to its governmental structure. Many groups were onboard but there were also holdouts who preferred to maintain their independence, or were not keen to leave their home region if the NUG ordered them to join a frontline elsewhere.

For those groups that did not want to join the NUG’s chain-of-command, including many of the country’s ethnic rebel armies, what followed was a delicate balancing act with the NUG, as well as the many other groups fighting the junta. Even with a common enemy, there remained lots of potential friction among the ethnic armies: over claims of territory, over key supply routes, over which area belonged to which ethnic homeland. To most analysts’ surprise, for the first years of the anti-coup rebellion most resistance groups managed to keep a united front against the junta. But over time, as the tide started to turn against the resistance and the battlefield became too crowded by an ever-increasing number of different armed factions, tensions started to boil over.

The NUG tries to establish control

The NUG returned from exile in early 2025 to set up a system of governance in the territories under resistance control. In order to be an effective government it needed to have the armed factions within its territory under its nominal control, or at the very least be able to keep the independent groups at bay. This meant that it became the NUG’s responsibility to deal with groups which stood accused of committing abuses against the civilian population. One such group was the Burma National Revolutionary Army (BNRA), a resistance group based in the Pale Township of southwestern Sagaing, led by the notorious Bo Nagar.

Bo Nagar’s BNRA was accused by locals of extorting money at checkpoints, forcing travelers to pay a hefty tax. On top of that the BNRA was also acting aggressively towards other resistance groups, treating the Pale township as its exclusive territory. Tensions between the NUG and BNRA reached a breaking point this past February when BNRA fighters killed a PDF member in the area and the NUG demanded the dismantling of BNRA checkpoints. NUG-aligned forces quickly overwhelmed the BNRA, killing around a dozen members. But while the BNRA’s camps were overrun and its soldiers captured, Bo Nagar managed to escape.

What happened next remains a bitter memory for many. Bo Nagar appeared on junta-aligned state-TV the next day, announcing his defection from the resistance to the military. The junta reportedly dispatched a helicopter to evacuate Bo Nagar and his family from the area. Bo Nagar was pictured behind a desk, handing over his weapon to a junta officer, symbolizing his surrender to the government.

The price for his evacuation and amnesty for his family turned out to be the valuable information he had on resistance camps in the area. Following the defection, junta forces launched an offensive in the Pale Township, overwhelming the resistance. The NUG had gambled on its forces being able to quickly defeat the BNRA and establish control over Pale. But they failed to consider that a cornered Bo Nagar might betray the resistance. The fiasco demonstrated what could go wrong should the NUG seek to enforce its own dominance over the wide range of armed groups operating in resistance-held territories.

Surprisingly, this didn’t discourage the NUG from seeking confrontation with other resistance groups. To name just a few examples; in June NUG forces arrested Sit Nyein Naing, the popular commander of the PDF Sagaing, a resistance group which operates outside of the NUG’s command structure. A few weeks later, NUG forces in the Mandalay region raided a camp of the People’s Liberation Army, an openly communist resistance group which styles itself on Mao Zedong’s PLA in China. Four NUG fighters died when they hit a landmine placed by the PLA. That very same week, the NUG raided a camp in the Monywa township belonging to the independent resistance group People’s Security Force. Six fighters were killed in clashes which ensued following the raid.

The NUG is increasingly finding itself in a difficult spot. On the one hand, people living in resistance-held territories look towards the NUG to maintain a sense of stability, counter abuses by fighters against civilians and implement an effective form of governance. On the other hand, in order to achieve such dominance it needs to deal with the armed groups which fall outside its control and refuse to submit to NUG authority. This leads to clashes which increase instability, and the whole cycle continues ad nauseum. The number of incidents between the NUG and other resistance groups became so high that a collection of 90 different civil society groups came together in early July to publish a joint statement, rejecting interfactional fighting and pleading with the NUG to seek a peaceful resolution to its dispute with other factions.

A Defunct Alliance

It’s not just the NUG and local PDF cells which have seen an increase in conflict. The ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) have also found themselves at odds with each other. In Chin state two rival alliances of ethnic Chin groups, the Chin National Front and the Chin Brotherhood Alliance, have dominated the resistance. They’ve also been at each other’s throats, attacking one another’s positions, killing each other’s members, and effectively partitioning the resistance territories in Chin state into two fiefdoms.

But it is the case of the MNDAA and the collapse of the Three Brotherhood Alliance which stands out as the most prominent example of inter-resistance conflict. The Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BHA) was a very loose coalition of three different ethnic armies; the MNDAA, the TNLA, and the Arakan Army. The MNDAA is considered to be the armed group of the ethnic Chinese community which lives in a region known as the Kokang in northern Shan state. The TNLA, meanwhile, is the armed faction of the Ta’ang people, another ethnic community in northern Shan state. The Arakan Army is the only one of the three which operates outside of Shan state, in Rakhine state all the way on the other side of the country.

The 3BHA launched a major offensive in October 2023, which came to be known as Operation 1027. For those who follow the war in Myanmar, this operation is already legendary - the moment when resistance forces stepped out of the shadows and started seizing large swaths of territory from the junta.It also made the alliance’s name: after Operation 1027, the 3BHA was widely regarded as the most successful and powerful alliance within the whole of Myanmar.

Unfortunately, this couldn’t last. What followed was a slow disintegration of the alliance. Disputes over territory, key roads, and taxes started to bubble up, especially between the MNDAA and the TNLA, tensions that China and the junta worked to exploit. In spring of 2025, the MNDAA made the controversial decision to return control of the city of Lashio back to the junta, a city it had conquered only months prior. Following the return of junta forces to Lashio, another offensive by the government was launched on territory of the TNLA. The MNDAA stood aside and didn’t come to the aid of its supposed ally.

By February this year things had reached breaking point. Fighting erupted between the MNDAA and TNLA in northern Shan state. On the morning of 14 March, MNDAA forces launched an offensive on the TNLA in the town of Kutkai, deploying artillery and drones to take TNLA positions around town. After seizing Kutkai, MNDAA troops moved towards the border town of Namkham, another TNLA-stronghold. While they would ultimately back off from their assault, the damage had been done. To this day, MNDAA holds Kutkai and villages to its west, where locals report being ordered to remove TNLA flags and signs in the Ta’ang language.

Perhaps more importantly, the fighting led to accusations that China was instigating violence between rebel groups, perhaps in the hope of making groups like MNDAA more dependent on Beijing. China had indeed told the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC) - a bloc of ethnic armed groups, of which both MNDAA and TNLA are members - not to get involved in the dispute, suggesting it was giving political cover to the MNDAA’s assault. Whatever the truth, the fighting seems to have confirmed the end of the Three Brotherhood Alliance. Once Myanmar’s most powerful rebel coalition, its members have now gone their separate ways.

SCEF, An(other) Attempt at Unity

To counter the growing disunity among the different resistance factions, the NUG and other major EAOs have at times tried to form broader alliances. The latest attempt is the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union, or SCEF.

Announced in early April, the SCEF brought together the NUG with some of the most powerful ethnic organizations in the country, such as the Kachin Independence Organization, The Karen National Union, the Chin National Front, and the Karenni National Progressive Front. The desire this time round is to create an alliance that is not just military, but political: at its birth, the founding members declared a shared goal to build what they describe as a federal democratic state in Myanmar.

In the months since, the SCEF council has put out numerous statements. It has also been a way for other governments such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Canada to diplomatically address the armed resistance, and has served as a confidence boost for the NUG and its partners that progress is still being made. But the SCEF’s foundation was also marked by the absence of key EAOs. The Arakan Army, the TNLA, MNDAA, and Chin Brotherhood were among some of the most noticeable absentees, all likely wary of stepping into another alliance, and instead preferring to maintain their independence. NUG officials continue to claim that talks are ongoing with other groups in order to add them to the SCEF, but three months on from its founding, no additional member has yet joined.

Frankly, it’s likely that no new member will ever join. Tensions among the EAOs are increasingly coming to the surface. China’s active meddling in the conflict, especially near its own borders, has set groups which used to be allies against each other, weakening the wider cause of the anti-junta resistance while strengthening the hand of that very same regime.

Attempts by the NUG and allies to counter these developments and demonstrate more unity through political bodies like the SCEF are welcome, but as long as the SCEF remains little more than a diplomatic office abroad, nothing will change on the battlefield. Only sincere military cooperation between the NUG and different resistance movements can still turn the tide against the junta, which is why Myanmar’s generals and their Chinese allies will try anything to prevent that from happening. The Myanmar civil war has already been running for five years - longer than the better-known conflicts in Ukraine and Sudan. The fracturing of resistance unity suggests it may keep running for some time to come.