No-One Knows How Many Have Died in Myanmar's Civil War

On 3 August 2026, Myanmar’s deposed ex-leader Aung San Suu Kyi **met** with a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in her nation’s capital city of Naypyidaw, in a rare instance of direct contact with the Nobel Peace laureate.

Suu Kyi’s contact with the Red Cross representative—the first time anyone has documented proof of life for Suu Kyi outside Myanmar’s military regime in years—proves that for now, she is not among the dead from Myanmar’s ongoing civil war.  But like Suu Kyi’s nebulous health status, Myanmar’s overall death toll is notoriously difficult to pin down.

According to international conflict tracker **ACLED**, over 100,000 people have died during the conflict since it began in February 2021. But even this is a **severe undercount**, in a war where many millions of people have been displaced, per the United Nations, and where more than 1,200 distinct armed groups are active contributors to the violence.

In this particular war, it is especially difficult to reach an accurate death toll. In fact, many of Myanmar’s war dead are likely never to be counted—in a grim reality that absolves the ruling regime from accountability, for killings that are forever lost to history.

To explain the challenge, we can answer two tightly interrelated questions: Why is the Myanmar civil war’s known death toll so high? And why are deaths, in this particular war, so difficult to count?

Killing Vectors.

Myanmar’s multidimensional conflict poses a unique, fundamental challenge for outside monitors. Most global wars and flashpoints fall into one of four categories:

·         A direct confrontation between two major factions (Russia vs Ukraine, Sudanese Armed Forces vs Rapid Support Forces).

·         A confrontation between a federal government and several opposition factions (Pakistan vs Pakistani Taliban & Baloch insurgents, Somalia vs Somaliland & Puntland & Jubaland & nationwide opposition)

·         A confrontation between governments, fought partially or fully via proxy forces (Democratic Republic of the Congo vs Rwanda, via Rwanda-backed M23 rebels)

·         A multi-directional conflict between a federal government and multiple internal or external adversaries, also fighting with each other (Ethiopia vs Tigray vs Amhara vs Eritrea, Syrian transitional government vs Assad remnants vs Islamic State vs Israel-backed Druze vs suspended Kurdish-led opposition)

Myanmar, however, is exponentially more complex. The nation’s ostensibly civilian-led government—a **thinly veiled replacement** for its military regime—battles a range of geographically separate, generally self-interested **ethnic militias**. Many of those ethnic militias share rivalries with each other, or work to advance their competing interests in the drug trade, in arms and human trafficking, and in other illicit enterprise, bringing them into unavoidable conflict with each other.

Those ethnic militias are bolstered and aided by **pro-democracy rebel units** scattered across the countryside, but the ethnic militias are neither unified with each other, nor with the pro-democracy rebels. They fight alongside each other, but those relationships are easy to disrupt, either through sheer inconvenience or a lack of mutual benefit. Where Myanmar’s pro-democracy rebels hold national ambition, the ethnic militias are concerned mostly with their own ancestral homelands. Where Myanmar’s alternative National Unity Government **struggles** to present a uniformly agreeable vision for post-war Myanmar, its ethnic militias are mostly uninterested.

Those **disparate rebel groups** are, in an overall sense, working to combat Myanmar’s regime. At times, however, rebel factions easily reach ceasefires with the national government, undercutting each other or taking advantage of a temporary peace to consolidate control over territory and **illicit enterprise**. Other rebel factions align, at times, with Myanmar’s national leadership, even if temporarily. Others, like those in autonomous Wa State, are largely disconnected from the conflict, but profit by distributing weapons and overseeing lucrative smuggling routes for all parties.

**China** complicates the dynamic even further, exerting an undeniable influence on all parties as the local hegemon across the border, but operating in pursuit of its own material interests—even in ways that sometimes conflict with Myanmar’s leadership, which Beijing supports.

Because Myanmar’s conflict is fought along so many **unpredictable, geographically disconnected axes** at once, it presents a broad profile of risks to soldiers and civilians alike. Tactics that work effectively in one area, will be ineffective or outright abandoned in others, and Myanmar’s rebels and its military change their approach dramatically, depending on whether they fight in marshes, dense jungles, cities, or coastal zones.

Worse yet, Myanmar’s military-style conflict blends together with high-risk, illicit enterprise, where local conflict, power struggles, and factional rivalries are all too common. Many of Myanmar’s warring parties, including the state, are deeply involved in illicit business. That dynamic further complicates the motives behind the civil conflict, and means that the conflict plays out in a much wider range of environments, including within the context of organized crime rivalries.

All of which is to say that this is a complicated war, and that complexity makes things like reaching a true death toll harder than you might at first assume. But overlapping factions aren’t the only issue. There’s also the nature of the violence itself.

Across varying times and regions of the conflict, Myanmar’s regime carries out a combination of long-range artillery shelling, close-quarters assaults, drone attacks, airstrikes, and other methods of attack. When targeting civilians or blended local populations of combatants and noncombatants, the nation’s troops have gained a reputation for several sorts of **indiscriminate violence** that complicate the challenge of counting the dead. Those include high-yield airstrikes against civilian targets, bombardment of neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, and the use of cluster munitions—all of which create immense amounts of rubble, and complicate rescue efforts.

In Myanmar’s rural areas, civilians often lack the equipment required to safely locate survivors before they die, let alone to pull them from the wreckage. Soldiers also engage in the routine burning of homes and entire villages, where bodies are often lost or never conclusively identified. The government’s military and intelligence forces regularly carry out **forced disappearances**, often followed by known or suspected extrajudicial executions. Government forces and rebel groups use anti-personnel landmines extensively, and sometimes in remote areas where bodies are very difficult to recover—if a blast is recorded at all.

In their conflicts against the regime and, at times, against each other, the nation’s rebels frequently run afoul of well-armed adversaries that take the time to dispose of bodies, including elderly and even children who have been rounded up and killed. Often, bodies are believed to be cremated in secret, or are simply never logged by military or rebel forces. Among the rebels, record-keeping is known to be poor overall, and rebels whose deaths would be reported by other factions—for example, pro-democracy rebels whose bodies are found by a local ethnic militia—are often not catalogued properly, or at all.

Because of the rebel and militia groups’ involvement in organized crime, deaths related to organized crime are often not catalogued by fighting factions—and are at risk of exclusion even when they are catalogued, because those deaths are not directly attributable to the Myanmar civil war itself. This, despite the reality that those deaths are often an indirect result of the conflict, which has created the key incentives that allow organized crime to flourish.

Tally Complications.

Even when a fighting faction in Myanmar may have every intention of cataloguing a combatant or civilian death, that faction may still struggle to do so. Alternately, they may do so in a way that makes it less likely for the dead to be included in internationally reported tallies.

Some problems trace back to **terrain**, or sheer biological reality. A high share of Myanmar’s territory is densely forested, and highly remote, with only occasional human passage during peacetime. Topography, too, is highly variable. Confrontations in these areas, especially between small units, are hard to keep track of or pinpoint geographically. Fighting forces often lack the manpower or spare time to trek back to the site of a skirmish and take stock of the deceased, even if they do know where the skirmish took place. Survivors are often only able to give hazy estimates of enemy dead, which aren’t always deemed important enough to track. Worse yet, large parts of Myanmar are very humid or densely forested, overrun with insects and small animals, meaning that body decomposition often occurs at an accelerated pace, with even bones hidden quickly by undergrowth or shifting mud.

Even when bodies are recovered, they’re often **very difficult to identify**. Myanmar does not have the forensic infrastructure or pre-war records required to DNA-match remains to individuals, and depending on the stage of body decomposition, underequipped rural authorities often struggle to determine whether a person died because of the war, or because of some unrelated cause. Most of Myanmar’s factions, and especially their local ethnic militias, tend not to keep highly detailed registries of fighters who hail from outside their communities. As a result, pro-democracy rebels assigned to support rural militias are even less likely to be positively identified—as are government soldiers and pro-government militia fighters whose bodies are identified by rebel groups.

Local burial practices also play a part, especially in areas where the federal government is not trusted, federal record-keepers do not travel or make inquiries, and local authorities see little need to disseminate death records outside their own communities. Bodies are typically cremated, with ashes scattered or buried in family or small community plots, meaning that even external conflict monitors will struggle to find centralized burial locations to form a list of recent deaths.

In some communities, corpses are buried instead, but whether a body or an urn is buried in a local plot, the war has created **gruesome incentives** for families to avoid marking graves. Military raids often involve the desecration of grave sites and even the intentional mutilation of remains, so burial locations and identities are kept secret more and more often. Bodies picked up on roadsides or in remote areas are generally buried anonymously, and families increasingly avoid even holding funerals or keeping unnecessary records, as funeral gatherings are a target for regime troops in contested areas.

If you’re wondering why we’re list these obstacles as they relate to fighting groups’ ability to catalogue fatalities by themselves, that’s because the Myanmar conflict is an exceedingly difficult area for outside monitors, journalists, and other third parties to gather an independent tally. Due to the nation’s generally poor and inconsistent record-keeping, external observers lack reliable state registries that catalogue death-related incidents. In Russia, for example, authorities maintain a National Probate Registry, which tracks inheritance cases for deceased Russians, and can be used as a back-door tool to identify war dead. Journalists are broadly **banned** from entering and operating within Myanmar, and face immense risk to their own lives if they choose to do so, because of a combination of threats by government forces, rebel groups, and organized criminals.

Humanitarian workers are subject to similar **access restrictions**, and are strictly blockaded from accessing rebel-held areas. Local journalists and activists face even greater risk, and generally prefer not to place themselves in harm’s way unnecessarily.

Counting the Dead.

In the Myanmar civil war, any death toll is expected to be inaccurate by default—and, more specifically, any death toll is expected to be an undercount. Reliable, methodologically sound examinations of the conflict’s casualties should be treated as an absolute floor, documenting an unknown proportion of the true toll.

Yet producing a “reliable, methodologically sound examination”, of any kind, is so difficult as to be impossible in this conflict. ACLED’s methods are cited frequently by global media organizations, as a gold standard for casualty reporting in Myanmar—but the organization’s death toll faces so little dispute or scrutiny, because there are no other organizations even attempting a similar effort. The expatriate-run Assistance Association for Political Prisoners attempts to verify civilian fatalities in the combat zone, but counts only 6,200 civilian fatalities across the war so far. As the organization acknowledges, their count is sourced from a baseline of fully documented, verifiable identities and death records, resulting in a severe and unavoidable undercount. The United Nations, meanwhile, reports broad estimates of the scale of this war’s humanitarian impact—5.2 million displaced, for example—and localized casualty counts from individual incidents, but does not attempt to present a robust, rigorous death toll estimate of its own, from the conflict overall.

Nor is this a case of international abdication of responsibility, in which other conflict-tracking groups could be trying to count the dead, and simply decline to do so. In the Myanmar civil war, information scarcity and access barriers are so severe that no independent organization could provide a verified tally that wouldn’t represent a severe undercount. Even **ACLED’s count** is drawn from a list of trusted sources that continue to report on the war, despite the fact that those trusted sources often provide divergent counts of fatalities. While ACLED’s process does account for source reliability, the monitor only takes the lowest provided fatality number from a given incident. Nor does the group attempt to approximate and adjust for underreporting, despite a tendency for violent events to “result in a higher number of fatalities that has traditionally been reported in Myanmar”.

Moreover, the group’s reliable sources are often part of, or reliant upon, armed groups participating in the conflict—and, as such, they are likely to relay death tolls that deflate the losses on their source’s side, and inflate the losses suffered by their source’s adversaries. As ACLED rightly notes: “fatality numbers are frequently the most biased and poorly reported component of conflict data, so these numbers too should be considered with such caveats.” Despite ACLED’s conservative practices, its Myanmar death toll currently stands at above 100,000 killed across five years—a value that should be treated as an absolute floor for future estimates, but which would nonetheless represent one of the deadliest conflicts being fought at this time.

The fact that ACLED’s count remains the standard for fatality reporting in Myanmar, despite its known and acknowledged shortcomings, is emblematic of the larger problem. Even if Myanmar’s ruling regime were entirely transparent and welcoming to third-party observers, the nation’s fragmented governance, its terrain and environmental factors, and the sheer multidimensionality of this conflict would combine to create an environment in which even the best death-toll estimates would be only rough approximations of reality. Instead, the Myanmar junta goes to great lengths to ensure that the truth of this war remains unreported, and that every report that attempts to catalogue the junta’s brutality, will always result in an undercount.

Even before the war’s conclusion, the junta has escaped accountability for so many of its worst atrocities—because, already, many of those atrocities have been permanently lost to history.