The jungle doesn’t care which side you’re on. It’s hot, it’s unforgiving, and right now, it’s where Myanmar’s rebel fighters are trying to hold a line that keeps slipping further back.
BBC journalists recently travelled with resistance forces to frontline positions across the country, and what they found was a conflict grinding down the people caught inside it. The military junta, known as the SAC, has been forcibly conscripting men into its ranks since a mandatory service law came into force last year. Young men are being pulled off buses, out of teashops, away from their families.
One resistance fighter, a 24-year-old from Sagaing region, described watching his cousin get taken at a checkpoint.
“He had no choice. None of them do. They put a uniform on you and point you at the enemy, and that enemy is us.”
It’s a brutal arithmetic. The junta needs bodies to replace its mounting casualties, and conscription gives them a conveyor belt of reluctant soldiers. Estimates from resistance monitoring groups suggest the SAC has conscripted tens of thousands of men since February 2024, though the exact numbers are difficult to verify inside a country where independent reporting is actively dangerous.
The rebels, for their part, are not without their own problems. After a series of significant territorial gains in late 2023 and early 2024, several ethnic armed organisations and People’s Defence Force units have found themselves overstretched. Supply lines are thin. Ammunition is expensive. International support remains frustratingly patchy.
In some areas, the military has managed to claw back ground it had lost, using air strikes to soften defences before sending in infantry. Civilian villages have paid a devastating price, with thousands more displaced into camps that are already struggling to cope.
What makes this conflict so difficult to read from the outside is how fragmented it remains. This isn’t a clean two-sided war; it’s a patchwork of alliances, local grievances, and shifting frontlines that stretch across a country the size of France.
The question nobody can answer yet is whether the junta’s conscription numbers can actually turn the tide, or whether forcing unwilling men to fight simply produces an army that doesn’t want to be there.
