Bloody siege ends Myanmar army’s control over western border

The end, as far as the BGP5 barracks was concerned, was loud and brutal. First, a screeching speaker calling for his surrender; then a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifle fire that destroyed the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.

BGP5 (the letters stand for Border Guard Police) was the Burma the military junta’s last stand in northern Rakhine state, which lies along the border with Bangladesh.

A video of the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) besieging the base shows its motley fighters, many of them barefoot, firing a variety of weapons at the base, as air force jets roar overhead.

It was a fierce battle, perhaps the bloodiest of the civil war that has consumed Myanmar since the The military seized power in a coup in 2021..

“They had dug deep trenches full of spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.

“There were reinforced bunkers and buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs or their lives trying to get through.”

For coup leader General Min Aung Hlaing, this was yet another humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.

For the first time, his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270 kilometers (170 miles) that divide Myanmar from Bangladesh, now entirely under AA control.

And with only Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, still firmly in military hands, although isolated from the rest of the country, AA is likely to be the first insurgent group to take full control of a state.

The army has been in headlong retreat from the Arakan Army since the beginning of the year, losing city after city.

The last army units withdrew in September. to BGP5, a complex covering about 20 hectares on the outskirts of the border town of Maungdaw, where AA laid siege.

BGP5 was built on the site of a Rohingya Muslim village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned down during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by the military in 2017.

It was the first of many burned villages I saw on a visit to Maungdaw just after the military operation in September that year, a mass of charred rubble among lush tropical vegetation, whose inhabitants were killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.

When I returned two years later, the new police complex had already been built and all the trees had been removed, giving the defenders a clear view of any attacking force.

The AA source told us their advance there was painfully slow, forcing the insurgents to dig their own trenches for cover.

He does not publish his own casualties. But judging by the intensity of the fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely to have lost hundreds of its own troops.

Throughout the siege, the Myanmar air force maintained a constant bombardment of Maungdaw, driving the last civilians out of the city.

Their planes dropped supplies to besieged soldiers at night, but there were never enough. They had a lot of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not receive any treatment for their wounds and the soldiers became demoralized.

They started giving up last weekend.

The AA video shows them leaving in a sorry state, waving white cloths. Some limp on makeshift crutches or jump with injured legs wrapped in rags. Few wear shoes.

Inside the destroyed buildings, the victorious insurgents filmed piles of corpses.

The AA says more than 450 soldiers died in the siege. He has released images of the captured commander, Brigadier General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling under the flagpole, which now flies the insurgents’ flag.

Pro-military commentators in Myanmar have been expressing their frustration on social media.

“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your sons to serve in the military,” one wrote. “Is this how you use us? Are you happy to see all those deaths in Rakhine?”

“At this rate, all that will be left of the Tatmadaw (military) will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.

The capture of BGP5 also shows that the Arakan Army is one of the most effective fighting forces in Myanmar.

Formed only in 2009 – much later than most other Myanmar insurgent groups – by ethnic Rakhine youth who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, AA is part of the Three Alliance Brotherhoods that have inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.

The other two members of the alliance stayed on the border in Shan State.

But the AA returned to Rakhine eight years ago to begin its armed campaign for self-rule, tapping into historic resentment among the Rakhine population over poverty, isolation and the central government’s neglect of their state.

AA leaders have proven to be intelligent, disciplined, and able to motivate their fighters.

They are already running the large areas of Rakhine State that they control as if they were running their own state.

And they have good weapons too, thanks to their ties to older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and they appear to be well funded.

However, there is a bigger question: to what extent the various ethnic insurgent groups are willing to prioritize the goal of overthrowing the military junta.

Publicly they say yes, along with the shadow government that was overthrown by the coup and the hundreds of volunteer popular defense forces that have emerged to support it.

In exchange for the support it receives from ethnic insurgents, the shadow government promises a new federal political system that will give Myanmar’s regions self-government.

But the other two members of the Three Brothers Alliance have already accepted China’s request for a ceasefire.

China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war that would almost certainly leave the military much of its power intact.

The opposition insists that the army must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made so many territorial gains at the expense of the junta, the ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China’s blessing rather than continue fighting to overthrow the generals.

AA’s victory raises more troubling questions.

The group’s leaders are silent about their plans. But it takes over a State that has always been poor and that has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of last year.

“80 percent of the homes in Maungdaw and surrounding villages have been destroyed,” a Rohingya man who recently left Maungdaw for Bangladesh told the BBC.

“The city is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”

Last month, the United Nations, whose agencies have very little access to Rakhine, warned of an imminent famine, due to the huge number of displaced people and the difficulty of getting supplies beyond a military blockade.

AA is trying to set up its own administration, but some of those displaced by the fighting have told the BBC that the group cannot feed or house them.

It is also unclear how AA will treat the Rohingya population, still believed to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after the expulsion of 700,000 in 2017.

Most live in northern Rakhine state and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the Rakhine ethnic majority, the AA’s support base, have long been strained.

They are now much worse after Rohingya militant groups, who have their power base in Bangladesh’s vast refugee camps, chose to side with the military against the AA, despite the military’s record of persecuting the Rohingya.

Many Rohingyas do not like these groups and some say they are happy to live in an AA-run Rakhine state.

But tens of thousands of people have been expelled by AA from the cities it has conquered and have not been allowed to return.

AA has promised to include all communities in its vision of a future independent of the central government, but has also denounced the Rohingyas it is fighting alongside the army. In August, dozens of Rohingya, many of them women and children trying to cross into Bangladesh, were killed by bombs, almost certainly dropped from anti-aircraft drones.

“We cannot deny the fact that the Rohingya have been persecuted by the Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people supported it,” said the Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.

“The government wants to prevent Rohingya from becoming citizens, but the people of Rakhine believe that there should not be any Rohingya in Rakhine state. Our situation today is even more difficult than under the military junta’s rule.”