As Myanmar’s military intensifies its campaign of collective punishment and indiscriminate bombing, Bago residents are turning their home region into a decisive front in the battle for Myanmar’s future. Crossing the flat, barren lands along the Sittaung River in the Bago region reveals a very different front line of the revolution, far from the eastern borders where ethnic armed organizations have fought for decades for a decentralized federal democracy that recognizes their rights.
Bago has become one of the most strategically important areas in efforts to overthrow the military junta that illegally took power in 2021. Located between Yangon, the country’s largest city, and the military capital Naypyidaw, it is a critical corridor. In recent years, revolutionary forces have built a stronghold here, challenging the junta’s control.
In March and April 2026, during a trip to Bago, my colleagues and I met members of this resistance, including doctors treating the wounded in clandestine clinics, young soldiers confronting the regime, and civilians suffering from the junta’s increasing brutality.
The revolutionary movement that has arisen since 2021 is far from perfect, but it represents a legitimate popular government in the face of a military junta that has illegally seized power and is terrorizing its own population. The People’s Defense Forces (PDF) network, operating under the National Unity Government alongside long-standing Karen resistance forces, now controls significant territory in Bago.
In these “liberated spaces”, governance is real. The junta, however, is fighting back with force to regain the territories it has lost in recent years. It has intensified its attacks against civilian populations and relies on a vast network of informants in Bago to monitor resistance movements. Villages suspected of supporting the pro-democracy movement are frequently targeted.
Recently, the military has adopted alarming new tactics, deploying commercial paramotors and gyrocopters to carry out targeted strikes on opposition-held villages. These planes have been used to bomb peaceful gatherings and vital civilian infrastructure – including schools, hospitals, religious sites and homes – in attacks aimed at spreading terror in pro-resistance communities. The inhabitants of Bago suffer the full brunt of the abuses of the junta. On March 5, junta soldiers surrounded the village of Yae Twin Kone, trapping residents for several days inside the area. The ordeal ended in tragedy when the army launched an airstrike on a Buddhist monastery in the area and fired on civilians, killing more than 25 people.
So Daw, a PDF commander, described to me the high-stakes rescue mission launched on March 7, after learning that civilians were being held hostage by the military. Although successful, he stressed that the rescue operation was “extremely risky”, a sentiment which underlines the precarious reality of the forces on the ground.
A commando from the PDF Spring Warrior Column described how they entered the village after 10 p.m. to repel junta forces and rescue civilian hostages. As the military withdrew, the fighters supported the fleeing civilians. “I was guiding them,” the PDF soldier told me from a makeshift bed in a clinic, where he was recovering from injuries sustained just a week after the rescue. “The children held my hand as I led them out. We carried an elderly and injured woman on a bamboo stretcher and a longyi.”
A few weeks after the rescue, my colleagues and I at Fortify Rights interviewed survivors of the junta’s detention and subsequent bombings. One man described being tied up and forced to the ground by soldiers. As he lay there, he heard the crackle of the military radio: “We shot a child,” a soldier reported. It was only later that the man realized that it was his son’s murder.
On March 6, the junta granted him permission to travel to the Buddhist monastery hit by the airstrike. There he finds his wife among the ruins. The army allowed survivors to bury in two mass graves the more than 25 civilians killed in strikes and shootings in the area.
“I carried my wife’s corpse,” he told us. “I also carried my son to the burial area.”
The attack was not a mistake or a case of civilians being killed in the crossfire; this was a deliberate attack on civilians seeking refuge in a monastery with no armed presence in the protected site. “At that time, they were at the monastery. We told them: ‘PDF is not in the village.’ The soldiers knew there was no resistance,” the man told me firmly. According to him, the motive was clear: “The military wanted us to stop supporting the resistance.”
Incidents like these reveal the military’s broader strategy of collective punishment, which aims to break down civilian support for revolutionary forces. In all areas of Myanmar controlled by these forces, the military junta bombs civilians almost daily, seeking to punish them for their resistance.
Yet years later, the pro-democracy movement in Bago and other parts of Myanmar endures, and the people of Myanmar are determined in their fight to rid the country of its brutal, corrupt and murderous army.
The struggle in Bago goes to the heart of the question of who will govern Myanmar and what Myanmar’s future will look like. The people of these villages, as in many parts of Myanmar, are keeping the revolution alive through a fierce fight against dictatorship.