Myanmar’s military claimed on Thursday (May 7, 2026) to have recaptured a key northern transport corridor towards China after a 15-month battle, touting a counterblow to rebels in the civil war.

The Southeast Asian nation’s armed forces have been battling an array of Opposition factions since a 2021 military coup that ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Pro-democracy guerrillas fighting alongside ethnic minority armies have won significant victories, but in recent months have become increasingly fractured and suffered setbacks.

The military said it crushed “terrorist insurgent groups” along a route linking the central and second largest city of Mandalay to the northern hub of Myitkyina, about 50 kilometres (31 miles) from China’s border.

AFP was not immediately able to verify the claim.

“The operations lasted for over one year and three months, during which a total of 322 major and minor engagements were fought,” the Myanmar commander-in-chief’s office said in a statement.

It said the bodies of 138 rebels were seized, and some military members “also made the ultimate sacrifice” — without confirming the number of military fatalities.

A combined offensive starting in late 2023 once saw rebel groups surge out of Myanmar’s fringes towards areas outside Mandalay, the ancient royal capital.

Analysts say that offensive had the backing of China as it sought to shore up influence along its border, but Beijing reined in rebels as it feared Myanmar collapsing into a failed state.

In recent months, two of the trio of ethnic minority armies leading that attack signed Beijing-brokered truces, leaving allied, lesser-trained pro-democracy forces exposed and increasingly backfooted.

At the same time, China has enthusiastically backed Myanmar’s elections, which this year delivered a walkover win for the military’s allies in civilian politics.

After five years ruling as armed forces chief, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing was last month sworn in as civilian president in a transition democracy monitors dismissed as a rebranding of military rule.

The government has pledged to step up trade with China, reviving discussions of long-stalled energy and transport infrastructure projects.

“Regional trade is now moving more smoothly and efficiently,” the Myanmar military statement said, announcing the reopening of the Mandalay-Myitkyina route.

Myanmar’s junta called on Sunday (February 1, 2026) for ex-civil servants who quit their jobs in protest over the coup five years ago to report back to work, pledging to remove absent state employees from “blacklists”.

After the military snatched power in a coup on February 1, 2021, tens of thousands of public workers, including doctors and government administrators, left their posts in a surge of civil disobedience.

Some found private employment, while others joined pro-democracy rebels defying the military in a civil war that has killed tens of thousands on all sides. Last week, the junta completed a month-long election it has touted as a return to civilian rule.

But the dominant pro-military party won a walkover victory in a vote democracy watchdogs say was stacked with army allies to prolong its grip on power.

The junta’s National Defence and Security Council said civil servants who “left their workplaces without permission for various reasons” since February 2021 should “report and make contact with the offices of their former departments”.

“Following verification, employees found not to have committed any offence, as well as those who had committed offences but have already served their sentences and whose names still appear on the blacklists, are being removed from the blacklists,” the council said in a statement published in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

Public employees who had been absent from work were placed on blacklists, “leading some to remain in hiding”, it added.

After the coup, in which the military ousted the elected government of democratic figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi, tens of thousands of striking public workers joined the “Civil Disobedience Movement” in protest.

The junta responded with a crackdown on demonstrators, relying on tips from informers and surprise raids to round up those on strike. Today, more than 22,000 people are languishing in junta jails, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners monitoring group.

Suu Kyi remains in military detention, and her massively popular party has been dissolved. The junta’s phased elections ended last Sunday without voting in one in five of Myanmar’s townships, amid fighting that has left large swaths of the country outside military control.

Parties that won 90% of seats in the previous election in 2020 — won in a landslide by Suu Kyi’s party — did not appear on the ballot this time, the Asian Network for Free Elections said.

A few dozen early voters in Myanmar’s widely criticised elections cast their ballots at the country’s embassy in Bangkok on Saturday as polls opened for citizens abroad.

Myanmar’s junta snatched power in a 2021 coup which plunged the country into a many-sided civil war, but it promises that phased polls — slated to begin in certain areas in late December — will move the country towards peace and democracy.

But its election commission on Saturday called off vote-holding in almost 1,600 village areas, a major cancellation of already-limited polls.

Meanwhile early voting abroad has begun at a few Myanmar embassies, including in Hong Kong, Singapore, Chiang Mai and Bangkok.

There was a heavy police presence on Saturday at the Bangkok embassy, where AFP journalists saw around 25 people sign up in the first two hours of polling.

Several voters declined to offer comment, but Moe Moe Lwin, 42, said she believed peace would follow the election.

“I came to vote as I want peace and I want to live with love and kindness,” she told AFP. “I want to see unity between Myanmar citizens.”

Construction worker and first-time voter Khun Kyaw Swe said he hoped to see educational and regional development after the election.

There are around half a million documented Myanmar nationals in the capital, according to Thailand’s labour ministry.

The International Organization for Migration estimates there are 4.1 million Myanmar nationals residing in Thailand, many of whom have fled the war and are undocumented.

Officials at the embassy told AFP they did not know how many people had filled the required voting registration form, which had an October 15 deadline.

Vote limited in scope

Deposed lawmakers excluded from the vote, human rights monitors and rebel groups opposing the junta have dismissed the election as a charade to disguise continuing military rule.

A Master’s student at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University said Saturday he refused to take part in an election he described as a “fake showcase”.

The 29-year-old, who requested anonymity for security reasons, said there is “no hope” for an election held “while civilians are oppressed, displaced, and denied basic rights of citizens”.

“There will be a few individuals who may feel pressured or forced to vote,” he said, but the majority of Myanmar people living in Thailand “don’t accept” the election.

On Saturday, the junta-stacked Union Election Commission (UEC) announced that voting in 1,585 village areas had been called off.

The territories “have been deemed not conducive to holding free and fair elections”, it said in a statement published in Burmese-language newspapers.

In September, the junta said its long-promised election would not be held in about one in seven national parliament constituencies.

The military government introduced broad new legislation ahead of the polls, including clauses punishing protesting or criticising the election with up to a decade in prison.

There have been other signs that the poll will be limited in scope.

A census held last year in preparation for the election estimated it failed to collect data from 19 million of the country’s 51 million people, according to provisional findings.

Myanmar’s military said Sunday (November 23, 2025) it arrested nearly 1,600 foreign nationals in five days in a highly publicised crackdown on a notorious internet scam hub on the Thai border.

Sprawling fraud factories have mushroomed in war-torn Myanmar’s border regions, housing scammers who target internet users with romance and business cons worth tens of billions of dollars annually.

Myanmar’s junta has long been accused of looking the other way as the illicit industry grows, but has trumpeted a crackdown since February after being lobbied by key military backer China, experts say.

Additional raids beginning last month were part of a smokescreen, according to some monitors, choreographed to vent pressure from Beijing without too badly denting profits that enrich the junta’s militia allies.

In its latest publicised tally, the junta said “1,590 foreign nationals who entered Myanmar illegally were arrested” from November 18 to 22 in raids on gambling and fraud hub Shwe Kokko, according to state media The Global New Light of Myanmar.

“Moreover, authorities seized 2,893 computers, 21,750 mobile phones, 101 Starlink satellite receivers, 21 Routers and a large number of industrial materials used in the online fraud and gambling activities,” the newspaper said.

After an AFP investigation last month revealed receivers from the Starlink satellite internet service had been installed en masse at scam compounds, the Elon Musk-owned company said it had disabled more than 2,500 Starlink devices in the vicinity of suspected Myanmar scam centres.

The Global New Light of Myanmar said 223 people accused of perpetrating online fraud and gambling at Shwe Kokko were detained on Saturday alone, including 100 Chinese nationals.

Video published by local media showed a steamroller crushing hundreds of computer monitors lined up in rows next to piles of already smashed mobile phones at the Shwe Kokko compound on Saturday.

Scam hubs, staffed by thousands of willing workers as well as people trafficked from abroad, have proliferated in Myanmar’s loosely governed borderlands since a 2021 coup sparked a civil war in the country.

While China is a key military backer of the junta, analysts say Beijing is increasingly irate at the rampant scams targeting and enlisting its citizens.

Scam victims in Southeast and East Asia alone were conned out of up to $37 billion in 2023, according to a UN report, which said global losses were likely “much larger”.

One of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed opposition factions has agreed to a China-brokered withdrawal from a lucrative ruby mining hub, the group said on Wednesday.

Myanmar has been mired in a civil war since the military grabbed power in a 2021 coup, with the junta fighting an array of pro-democracy guerrillas and powerful ethnic minority armed groups.

The ragtag opposition initially struggled to make headway before organising a combined offensive in late 2023 that seized huge swaths of territory.

The northern ruby-mining town of Mogok was captured by rebels last summer, but the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) — the most powerful group driving that offensive — said it will now pull out.

The TNLA said in a statement on Telegram it had made a deal with the junta after two days of talks that ended on Tuesday, overseen by a Chinese special envoy in the city of Kunming in southern China.

According to the deal, the group will pull out of the townships of Mogok and neighbouring Momeik.

The statement did not specify a timeframe but said the military had agreed to call off air strikes, while “troops from both sides will stop advancing” from midnight on Wednesday.

A Myanmar junta spokesman could not be reached for comment.

China is a key power broker in Myanmar’s civil war, analysts say, supporting both opposition groups and the junta on a sliding scale according to its economic and security interests.

Some conflict monitors say the offensive during which Mogok was captured had at least Beijing’s tacit backing, as China grew weary of the junta’s inaction over internet scam centres that seed chaos along their border.

However, China has more openly backed the junta this year as it battles to regain ground ahead of an election scheduled to start in December, which it is touting as a path to stability.

The polls are set to be blocked from vast rebel-held enclaves, and numerous international monitors have dismissed them as a ploy to disguise continuing military rule.

However, Beijing has given its backing in diplomatic rhetoric and on the ground.

The northern city of Lashio — the junta’s most significant territorial loss since the start of the civil war — was handed back to the military in April after Chinese mediation.

Myanmar’s military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite internet terminals, state media reported Monday (October 20, 2025).

Myanmar is notorious for hosting cyberscam operations responsible for bilking people all over the world. These usually involve gaining victims’ confidence online with romantic ploys and bogus investment pitches.

The centers are infamous for recruiting workers from other countries under false pretenses, promising them legitimate jobs and then holding them captive and forcing them to carry out criminal activities.

Scam operations were in the international spotlight last week when the United States and Britain enacted sanctions against organizers of a major Cambodian cyberscam gang, and its alleged ringleader was indicted by a federal court in New York.

According to a report in Monday’s Myanma Alinn newspaper, the army raided KK Park, a well-documented cybercrime center, as part of operations starting in early September to suppress online fraud, illegal gambling, and cross-border cybercrime.

It published photos displaying seized Starlink equipment and soldiers said to be carrying out the raid, though it was unclear when exactly they were taken.

KK Park is located on the outskirts of Myawaddy, a major trading town on the border with Thailand in Myanmar’s Kayin state. The area is only loosely under the control of Myanmar’s military government, and also falls under the influence of ethnic minority militias.

Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesperson for the military government, charged in a statement Monday night that the top leaders of the Karen National Union, an armed ethnic organization opposed to army rule, were involved in the scam projects at KK Park.

The allegation was previously made based on claims that a company backed by the Karen group allowed the land to be leased. However, the Karen, who are part of the larger armed resistance movement in Myanmar’s civil war, deny any involvement in the scams.

Myanma Alinn said the army ascertained that more than 260 buildings were unregistered, and seized equipment, including 30 sets of Starlink satellite internet terminals. It said 2,198 individuals were detained though it did not give their nationalities.

Starlink is part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and the terminals link to its satellites. It does not have licensed operations in Myanmar, but at least hundreds of terminals have been smuggled into the Southeast Asian nation.

The company could not be immediately reached for comment Monday but its policy bans “conduct that is defamatory, fraudulent, obscene, or deceptive.”

There have been previous crackdowns on cyberscam operations in Myanmar earlier this year and in 2023.

Facing pressure from China, Thailand and Myanmar’s governments launched an operation in February in which they released thousands of trafficked people from scam compounds, working with the ethnic armed groups that rule Myanmar’s border areas.

A Chinese court sentenced to death on Monday (September 29, 2025) 16 members of a family-run criminal gang that established deadly scam centres in Myanmar’s Kokang region on the border with China, among other crimes.

Scam compounds have flourished in Myanmar’s lawless borderlands, staffed by foreigners — many of them Chinese — who say they were trafficked and forced to swindle people online, part of a multibillion-dollar illicit industry.

Beijing has stepped up cooperation with Southeast Asian nations in recent months to crack down on the compounds, and thousands of people have been repatriated to China.

The Wenzhou Intermediate People’s Court said on Monday that a family-run criminal organisation had engaged in cyber fraud, drug trafficking, organising prostitution, setting up casinos, and other crimes from 2015.

They had “relied on armed force” to establish multiple compounds in Kokang, the court said in a statement posted on social media.

The court said the group had killed 14 people, including 10 involved in fraud who had tried to escape from the group or disobeyed its management.

It cited one incident in October 2023, when the accused “opened fire” on people at a scam compound to prevent them from being transferred back to China.

The group’s operations attracted numerous “financial backers” to whom it provided armed protection, and involved more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), the court said.

Five of those sentenced to death were granted a two-year reprieve, while another 23 suspects were given prison sentences ranging from five years to life.

In April, the United Nations warned that Chinese and Southeast Asian gangs are raking in tens of billions of dollars a year through cyber scam centres.

The activity, which relies on an army of workers often trafficked and forced to toil in squalid compounds, was spreading to South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and some Pacific Islands, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said.

The UN estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are working in scam centres globally.

By April this year, around 7,000 people from at least two dozen countries had been repatriated from Myanmar.

Myanmar and Thailand’s busiest trade crossing was closed for a second day on Tuesday (August 19, 2025) after the military junta pledged to throttle black markets funding armed opposition groups ahead of a disputed December election.

The military, which seized power in a 2021 coup, controls the Myawaddy bridge that carries more than $120 million of trade between the neighbouring nations every month, according to Thai customs figures.

However, along the highway linking the crossing to the commercial capital Yangon, its troops are fighting a civil war against an array of guerrillas who fund their fighting with lucrative toll gates.

Naing Maung Zaw, a spokesman for the military’s Border Guard Forces, said the crossing had been shut “for trading vehicles” since Monday.

The military has pledged to clamp down on illicit trade funding its opponents ahead of a December 28 election, which is already being criticised abroad as a ploy to rebrand continuing military rule.

The vote is also set to be blocked in huge tracts of the country administered by a kaleidoscope of pro-democracy guerrillas and ethnic armed organisations that have found common cause since the coup.

A Thai security source based at the border, speaking anonymously, said the junta had “set regulations to make it uncomfortable for minority groups, to try to stop them from earning money or benefits”.

As the junta shut the crossing on Monday, it announced the late December start date for phased elections that it has trumpeted as an off ramp to the civil war.

The military has made limited gains against rebels in recent weeks, seizing back ground where it can now hold the election. The poll is expected to take weeks to complete.

Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing pledged last week to combat border-based opposition fighters that “use the profits collected from illegal trade to strengthen their forces”.

Ahead of the polls, democratic figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi remains jailed after being deposed, with her party dissolved and other ousted lawmakers calling for a boycott.

The junta has also introduced harsh new laws dictating prison sentences of up to 10 years for critics or those who protest against the vote.