Myanmar has entered the sixth year of a brutal civil war that the military regime, which seized control of the country in 2021, is increasingly confident it can win.The conflict was triggered when the country’s Senior General Min Aung Hlaing ousted an elected government and detained civilian leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listThat power grab reversed a decade of fragile democratic transition and produced not only a military dictatorship but a nationwide uprising — neither of which was new to this Southeast Asian nation of about 55 million people.Since Burma’s independence (as the country was then known) from the British in 1948, the state centre has been in near-continuous conflict with ethnic minority communities who call the country’s highland borderlands their home.Many were promised autonomy after decolonisation, but that never materialised.The military and its leaders have been tightly woven into the country’s social and political fabric for more than six decades and have come to oversee a vast business empire that encompasses everything from natural resource extraction to beer sales.Bolstered by arms sales from China and Russia, the military now deploys fighter jets, attack helicopters, tanks and a growing arsenal of drones in its civil war fight.Many of its adversaries were once protesters who brandished little but laminated signs with anti-coup messages; some had slingshots.But a bloody crackdown by the military drove many peaceful demonstrators to seek combat tr …
