Myanmar's endless night: civil war, military brutality, and ASEAN's failure

By John Fernando Muñoz | 2026-06-23

A military aircraft took off from Tada-U Air Base on the night of May 21 with orders to bomb Ywa Sin village, in Khin-U Township, in the Sagaing Region of northwestern Myanmar. Roughly 40 minutes later, the military sent in suicide drones to strike the area again.

The back-to-back attacks left four residents dead and more than 20 homes in ruins. No military targets were reported in the area.

This is the daily reality for the people of Myanmar, which has been going on for more than five years now, since a February 2021 coup toppled the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then, the military has perfected the art of waging war against its own population, while the international community has yet to find a way to stop it.

While diplomats gathered from May 7 to 9 at the 48th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Cebu, Philippines, to debate the possibility of a virtual meeting with the foreign minister of Myanmar's military junta, the bombs kept falling on villages.

A country falling apart

The scale of the catastrophe is difficult to absorb in numbers alone. More than 6,000 civilians have been killed and more than 5.3 million people have been displaced since February 2021, roughly 3.7 million of them seeking refuge in Myanmar's own cities and the rest in neighboring countries including Thailand, India, and Bangladesh.

More than half of the country's townships are currently caught up in active fighting, and the global monitor Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) estimated that by the end of 2025, conflict-related deaths for that year alone would approach 15,000.

Meanwhile, one-third of Myanmar's entire population requires humanitarian assistance.

The military currently controls roughly one-fifth of the country's territory, including the capital, major airports, and the urban cores of Yangon and Mandalay. Resistance forces and ethnic armed organizations contest or control most of the rest.

That failure to hold territory has pushed the junta toward increasingly reckless actions aimed at demonstrating power and intimidating adversaries.

Over the past year, fighting was recorded in all seven regions and all seven states that make up Myanmar's administrative map. Military airstrikes hit residential areas, hospitals, schools, religious sites, and camps for internally displaced people.

In May 2025, an airstrike on an opposition-run school in the Sagaing Region killed 22 students and two teachers. In September of that same year, a military jet bombed two private boarding schools for young people in Rakhine State, killing at least 23 students.

Air and drone strikes carried out with Russian- and Chinese-made equipment reached unprecedented levels in 2025.

Brutality

Over five years in power, the military junta's offensive has had a devastating impact on Myanmar's infrastructure, economy, political life, civilians, and health and education systems.

According to organizations including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Fortify Rights, the military's post-coup atrocities amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, fueled by decades of impunity.

At least 30,000 people have been detained since the early-2021 coup, among them more than 6,200 women and 625 children. Torture, sexual violence, and other degrading mistreatment are widespread practices in prisons, interrogation centers, military bases, and other detention facilities.

Some 2,200 people have died in junta custody since then, according to reports from humanitarian organizations.

The elections also present a bleak picture. Three rounds of voting were held between late December 2025 and early 2026, each with an outcome predetermined by the junta. On April 3, Min Aung Hlaing removed his military uniform and was sworn in as Myanmar's new president.

In his inaugural address, he called for normalized relations with ASEAN, spoke of peace and reconciliation, then freed elected President Win Myint, reduced Aung San Suu Kyi's sentence, and allowed her to serve the remainder under house arrest. All of it was aimed at cleaning up his image and establishing some degree of governance over the territory.

Those cosmetic moves, however, did not amount to a democratic transition.

"It's no accident that this election has been made possible through increased human rights abuses, from arbitrary detention to unlawful attacks on civilians, which has been the military's modus operandi for decades," said Ejaz Min Khant, a human rights specialist at Fortify Rights.

Two weeks after the inauguration, the junta imposed martial law across 60 townships under a new 90-day emergency ordinance.

Aid as a weapon

The March 2025 earthquake, which killed at least 3,600 people in Myanmar and affected 17 million more, once again exposed the junta's cruelty and its use of emergencies and natural disasters as tools of population control.

Min Aung Hlaing publicly appealed for international help to respond to the crisis left by the 7.7-magnitude quake. Then junta officials denied visas to nearly every international emergency response team, confiscated donated medicine, harassed humanitarian workers, and blocked all internet access.

"The junta has a track record of blocking aid to areas controlled by its adversaries," said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser at the International Crisis Group, noting that the regime has used blockades to "deprive its enemies of resources."

That approach was nothing new. The junta did the same thing in 2023 after Cyclone Mocha, and did it again after Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which killed more than 138,000 people.

A consensus that changes nothing

At the opening of the 48th ASEAN Summit in the Philippines in early May, the bloc's leaders came face to face with a question they had been sidestepping for five years: what exactly has the Five-Point Consensus achieved?

The answer, by any honest accounting, is very little.

Although it was adopted with Min Aung Hlaing's personal participation, none of its five points have been meaningfully implemented since it was signed in April 2021. The five points called for an end to violence, inclusive dialogue, humanitarian access, the appointment of a special envoy, and a visit by that envoy to all parties.

Summit after summit, the bloc has reaffirmed the consensus without setting benchmarks, timelines, or consequences for non-compliance, giving the junta exactly what it was looking for within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: the appearance of international political engagement, but without accountability.

The bloc's internal divisions have served the junta well, producing outcomes like Thailand's formal recognition of Min Aung Hlaing as president.

The UN Security Council, for its part, remains paralyzed. China and Russia's close ties to the junta have prevented the body from adopting any binding measures against the military in power.

Humanitarian organizations in 2026 have concentrated their limited resources on 2.6 million people with the most acute needs in Myanmar, out of a projected 19.9 million who require urgent assistance.

The picture that emerges is this: the military junta cannot establish minimum control over the whole country, the resistance has not yet managed to bring down the regime, ASEAN cannot compel either side to the negotiating table, and the United Nations is paralyzed by China and Russia.

Meanwhile, Myanmar's civilians are trapped in a war in which they face constant bombardment of their schools, arbitrary detention and torture, blocked humanitarian aid, forced conscription, and displacement.