Frontier Myanmar • 10th October 2024

Conflict, uncertainty hang over Mogok’s gemstone industry

By RAJU GAUTAM, EMILY FISHBEIN and HPAN JA BRANG | FRONTIER


While the 200-kilometre journey from Mogok to Mandalay typically takes around five hours, for Ko Than Htoo and his family it was a gruelling 15-day journey. The main road was impassable due to heavy armed clashes, so they took an alternate route by minivan, sleeping at roadside monasteries along the way.


They had joined a caravan of thousands fleeing Mogok in the last week of June, after the Ta’ang National Liberation Army launche...

Al Jazeera • 4th October 2024

‘Like we are trapped’: Minorities suffer amid conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine

AA and its political wing say it is committed to diversity in Rakhine, but there is scepticism among some minorities.Earlier this year, artillery fire crashed through U Khup Thang’s home in Paletwa, in western Myanmar’s Chin State, killing his son. “It felt like a nightmare. I still struggle to find the words to describe it,” said U Khup Thang, an ethnic Chin farmer and labourer. Like others interviewed, he is using a pseudonym for security reasons.
U Khup Thang is one of the hundreds of thousan...

Al Jazeera • 1st August 2024

‘Potential for new Myanmar’ as anti-coup forces push new northern offensive

Fighting is escalating in an area stretching 280 kilometres (174 miles) from Mandalay to the city of Lashio, home of the military’s Northeastern Regional Command centre.On June 25, an explosion shook the town of Mogok, in Myanmar’s central Mandalay region, sending Hla Su and her family rushing for shelter in a nearby trench. Over the next three days, they waited underground for the fighting to stop, but it only got worse.
“When the explosions subsided, I cooked quickly, but I couldn’t eat well....

The New Humanitarian • 19th February 2024

How do you escape the war? Three young men’s stories from Sagaing, Myanmar

Myanmar’s February 2021 military coup sparked a humanitarian, economic, and human rights crisis across the country. Peaceful protests soon evolved into an armed uprising, to which the military has retaliated with a scorched-earth campaign targeting not only armed combatants but also their civilian support base.Sagaing, a formerly peaceful region in the country’s agricultural heartlands, has borne the brunt of the military’s violence. Since the coup, the region has been a hotbed of armed resistan...

Al Jazeera • 1st February 2024

‘Blood and sweat’: Myanmar resistance fights to overturn military coup

Three years after the generals’ power grab, anti-coup fighters say they want them out of Myanmar’s politics.On February 1, 2021, a military coup in Myanmar sparked widespread nonviolent protests that quickly turned into an armed uprising after the military responded with brutal force.
Ethnic armed organisations fighting for autonomy along the country’s borders also joined the anti-coup groups in a war, which has since reached an unprecedented scale in Myanmar’s history.Resistance forces share no...

Tea Circle • 28th December 2023

“We always feel unsafe in our homeland”: Dispatches from Kachin IDP youth - Tea Circle

On the night of 9 October 2023, 28 civilians, including twelve children, died in a large explosion adjacent to Mung Lai Hkyet internally displaced person (IDP) camp, located around three miles from the Kachin Independence Organization headquarters of Laiza. Rights groups have attributed the attack to the Myanmar military. In this article, four Kachin youth share their stories. These youths and their families have lived in Mung Lai Hkyet or the adjacent Woi Chyai IDP camp since war resumed betwee...

Al Jazeera • 18th October 2023

Military attack leaves Myanmar’s displaced civilians with ‘no safe place’

Dozens were killed last week when the military bombed a camp for people displaced by decades of conflict.On the night of October 9, Seng Mai was awoken by a deafening explosion that tore apart her shelter in Mung Lai Hkyet, a camp for conflict-displaced people in northern Myanmar’s Kachin State.
“The sound was so loud that I wondered whether I had even survived,” the 21-year-old told Al Jazeera.As rounds of mortar fire thundered from the direction of a nearby military post, she crawled into a ma...

Al Jazeera • 18th May 2023

Survivors wait ‘in hell’ after Cyclone Mocha pummels Myanmar

Residents tell Al Jazeera of widespread destruction from the cyclone’s ferocious winds and say they have yet to receive assistance.On Saturday, as “extremely severe” Cyclone Mocha gathered speed in the Indian Ocean and tracked a straight course for Myanmar’s northwestern Rakhine coast, Hla Tun made a critical decision.
While the vast majority of the residents of the seaside city of Sittwe, including his wife and daughter, headed inland or to higher ground, he instead taped up his windows, stocke...

Frontier Myanmar • 4th May 2023

Q&A: Kachin activist Sut Seng Htoi says ‘no issue should be censored or avoided’

By Hpan Ja Brang and Emily Fishbein


This interview was conducted in Burmese and translated by Hpan Ja Brang, and was edited for length and clarity by Emily Fishbein. It follows a Frontier feature on how pressure from the Kachin public overturned a rare earth mining project in KIO territory.


How has the 2021 military coup affected the Kachin activist movement?


Everyone in Myanmar is familiar with the countrywide revolution in response to the 2021 military coup, but for Kachin people, our...

Frontier Myanmar • 2nd May 2023

How the Kachin public overturned a rare earth mining project in KIO territory

By Emily Fishbein, Hpan Ja Brang, Zau Myet Awng, and Jaw Tu Hkawng


This article was supported by the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism Fund and is part of a series of articles about the coup’s impact on natural resource economies in Kachin State.


On April 15, in response to public protests, the Kachin Independence Organization cancelled controversial plans to allow new rare earth mining in the eastern district of its territory, in Kachin State’s Mansi Township.


KIO chairman, General...