Arakan Army holds the key to breaking Myanmar’s junta

Rebel outfit closing in on total Rakhine state control while threatening to shock military forces in nearby crucial central heartland

by Anthony Davis

As dry season fighting escalates sharply, the most consequential question hanging over Myanmar’s civil war can be stated briefly: What are the strategic intentions of the Arakan Army, the nation’s putative insurgent kingmaker?

Having secured dominance over its western seaboard homeland of Rakhine state in over a year of bitter combat, the ethnic Rakhine AA is today unique amid a plethora of ethnic minority armies and mostly ethnic Bamar Peoples Defense Forces (PDFs) battling the military’s State Administration Council (SAC) regime.

It stands alone as the only force in the country that combines the military weight, the geographic vantage and – critically – the strategic autonomy vis-a-vis domestic and external actors to tip Myanmar’s military checkerboard decisively one way or another.

How this army of an estimated 30,000 or more battle-hardened troops led by a charismatic 46-year-old Rakhine nationalist, Twan Mrat Naing, moves in the coming weeks will shape the future of a national conflict that since the February 2021 military coup has literally torn the country apart, forcing well over 3 million from their homes and livelihoods.

Two last fronts

Following a year and a half of unrelenting hostilities that began in Rakhine on November 13, 2023, as part of a broader campaign mounted with its northern Kokang and Ta’ang insurgent allies, the AA has almost completed its mission of ejecting SAC forces from the entirety of Rakhine state.

However, it remains engaged on two geographically separate fronts, namely around the state capital of Sittwe and, 110 kilometers to the south, a Bay of Bengal coastal enclave that includes Kyaukphyu town, the nearby Danyawady naval base and a Chinese-built deep-sea port and special economic zone (SEZ) at the southern terminal of natural gas and oil pipelines stretching north to the Chinese border.

(A third regime-held township on Manaung island is essentially irrelevant to wider military calculations.)

At the same time, since January this year, the AA and its PDF allies have opened an extended eastern front along and across the Arakan Yoma mountain range that divides Rakhine from Myanmar’s central heartland in Magwe, Bago and Ayeyarwady regions.

Against this backdrop, it is unlikely that the AA’s leadership has either the manpower reserves, logistical resources or the strategic appetite for the high-risk undertaking of a protracted two-front war.

Hard military logic dictates that to succeed on either front it will need to prioritize one or other of them. And the decision as to which, possibly already reached, will profoundly influence the national battlefield over the rest of this year and beyond.

Coastal campaign

A focus on completing the historic mission of liberating Rakhine state would mean mounting major campaigns to seize the cities of Sittwe and Kyaukphyu as far as possible before the advent of the monsoon rains in May.

Minor forays into the national heartland on the eastern front might, meanwhile, serve to keep the increasingly thin-stretched military off-balance and distracted.

Following the fall of the army’s western Regional Military Command at Ann in central Rakhine last December, the capture of the state capital would have powerful symbolic and political significance for a force inspired and driven since its founding in 2009 by a resurgent Rakhine nationalism.

The seizure of Kyaukphyu would imply control over the taps of offshore natural gas reserves that financially sustain the SAC’s war effort and the southern terminal of pipelines of vital importance to the economy of China’s landlocked southwestern region. 

On the other side of the ledger, any attempt to storm either enclave, let alone both, is fraught with risk. Both port towns are defended by significantly bolstered garrisons, each of several thousand troops, reinforceable by sea and air, fighting with their backs to the ocean and benefitting from daunting fire support from offshore naval assets and largely unchallenged air power.

The fates of other Rakhine coastal towns during the second half of 2024, notably Ngapali, Maungdaw, and the naval base at Maung Shwe Lay, suggest that AA forces might ultimately prevail.

But quite aside from the drain on finite ammunition stocks at the end of uncertain logistics lines from northern Myanmar, the human cost would be brutal: casualties would almost certainly rise into the low thousands killed and possibly up to 10,000 wounded.

For an insurgent force that, since late 2023, has been embroiled in 15 months of unremitting combat and already suffered thousands of casualties, the prospect of further heavy losses will be sobering and perhaps prohibitive.

There is also the somber reality that, even if finally victorious, after months of urban warfare, the AA would find itself ruling over cities reduced to rubble and economic installations crucial for future reconstruction in ruins.

Eye on the heartland

The alternative strategy Twan Mrat Naing and his military advisors will undoubtedly have considered would be a decisive shift of the AA’s center of military gravity away from the coast to the extended eastern front along the Arakan Yoma, pushing down into industrial and agricultural nerve centers of the country in the Ayeyarwady River Valley and Delta regions respectively.

Maintaining a minimal level of activity around Sittwe and Kyaukphyu without attempting to storm either town would, meanwhile, serve to tie down army garrisons and discourage any possible counter-offensives into already liberated territory.

From a purely military perspective, an eastern campaign has much to recommend it. Most obviously, the relatively short distances from the watershed of the Arakan Yoma down into the Ayeyarwady River valley means important targets and communication nodes can be reached rapidly.

At the same time, the sheer length of the eastern front – over 350 kilometers from Magwe in the north to the Delta in the south – offers the advantage of several potential or actual axes of main advance, thereby complicating regime responses.

Were the AA to infiltrate large raiding columns off-road to sow chaos between and behind regime defensive concentrations, the military could find itself struggling to react in an even more confused and challenging battlespace.

And on top of the geography, the eastern front also offers the important advantage of military burden-sharing with allied Chin and Bamar PDFs operating – and expanding  – under AA command and control.

Tentative advances since January will already have underscored SAC vulnerabilities on the eastern front. AA-led forces have made gradual gains both in Ngape township on the highway between Ann and Minbu in Magwe region, as well as further south along the road from Taungup on the Rakhine coast to Padaung on the Ayeyarwady River.

On both axes, resistance forces are already threatening logistically vital military-industrial plants run by the army’s Directorate of Defense Industries or Ka Pa Sa in its Burmese acronym.

Immediately at risk in the coming days is the small but strategically crucial municipality of Okeshittpin. Situated at the intersection of the east-west Taungup–Padaung road and the main north-south highway along the western bank of the Ayeyarwady, the town sits at the center of a cluster of Ka Pa Sa factories and is less than half an hour’s drive from the river.

Its capture by AA forces already advancing out of the hills would be a major shock to Naypyidaw.

More widely dispersed probing attacks into the Delta rice basket are similarly moving east, with clashes shifting from a coastal strip where the AA was vulnerable to naval bombardment to a crescent of three inland townships running north-south between Lemyethna, Yegyi and Thabaung.

In all cases, army defenses have required air support that appears to have been mostly ineffective.

Redrawing maps

If the military benefits of still tentative forays along the eastern front are becoming clearer, their longer-term political implications are undoubtedly more complex.

For the AA to throw its weight behind a campaign along multiple axes of advance into the national heartland implies a strategy that goes well beyond liberating Rakhine and staking a claim to full autonomy.

Given the fragility of the military regime and the geography of Rakhine State, the AA would become, by default, a central and even decisive player in shaping the national future. In a word, a “kingmaker.”

Rhetorically, at least, this is not a prospect that AA leadership has ever shied away from. In comments to The Irrawaddy online magazine in 2024, Twan Mrat Naing noted pointedly that “on a local scale limiting ourselves to our immediate ambitions without considering the broader context would undermine our success. We must adopt a holistic view that accounts for the entire union and our surrounding environment.”

In framing AA war objectives and the dangers of the future resurgence of a rump military regime, AA spokesman Khaing Tu Kha has been less diplomatic: “Only when the fascist regime is wiped off Myanmar’s map will people be guaranteed safety.”

In comments last year to local media, he added: “I would like to stress we can only secure freedom and safety after the regime is completely eradicated.”

Today, military developments have caught up with and perhaps even overtaken political rhetoric. If, in the coming weeks, advances on the AA’s eastern front gather real momentum, their cumulative impact, strategic and political, will likely reshape the trajectory of the civil war as profoundly as the dramatic gains of the “1027” campaign in north Shan state and northern Mandalay region.

Certainly, the proposition that after having lost Myanmar’s borderlands the SAC could fall back into a defensible “heartland fortress” – always delusional but widely touted since late 2023 – would be finally and unceremoniously buried. The shock of Rakhine-led forces severing major western lines of communication and infiltrating the Delta rice-basket would be evidence enough. 

If those advances were paralleled by a link-up between the AA and elements of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) across the central Bago Yoma spine of mountains, the purported “fortress’ would be split squarely across the middle.

As KNLA-led operations in the Sittaung Valley linking Yangon and Naypyidaw east of the Bago Yoma gather momentum, that link-up north of Yangon is arguably only a few months away.

At the same time, reinforced AA thrusts into the Ayeyarwady valley would undoubtedly galvanize and accelerate anti-SAC resistance across north-central Myanmar with ripple effects spreading from Magwe east into the Anyar dry zone between Naypyidaw and Mandalay.

Sweat on China’s brow

None of these developments will be received as good news in Beijing, where since August 2024, the Chinese government has thrown its support behind the SAC.

In what may go down as a seriously flawed misreading of national battlefield dynamics, Chinese diplomats have struggled to impose ceasefires in northern Myanmar aimed at securing the survival of the regime as a guarantor, however improbable, of China’s border stability, Myanmar-wide economic holdings and expansive geostrategic ambitions associated with its Belt and Road Initiative.

Even in the north where Chinese influence is at its most coercive, those efforts have met with pushback. The Kokang-based Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) agreed to a ceasefire in January, but has continued to balk at demands that it should now simply hand back to the SAC Lashio, the city on the main trade route to China which it captured in August 2024 after a month’s bloody fighting.

To date, at least, Beijing’s efforts to broker or enforce a peace between the military and another AA ally, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), dominant across northwestern townships of Shan state near the Chinese border, have proved entirely fruitless.

The TNLA has shown no inclination to quit the ruby-mining center of Mogok, north of Mandalay, which it captured in July 2024, while the SAC has ramped up a terror campaign of airstrikes targeted specifically against civilians in towns held by the TNLA and its PDF allies well behind front lines.

Operating some 600 kilometers from the Chinese border and locked in daily clashes with SAC forces, the AA is even less vulnerable to Chinese strong-arm tactics than its northern allies.

Indeed, the very fact that in recent weeks hostilities have flared around Kyaukphyu, the jewel in China’s Myanmar crown, where the state-owned CITIC group is building a deep-sea port and SEZ, has only served to underscore the limits of Chinese influence over the AA.