Myanmar Today

A Military That Is Losing

Here is something the world's headlines rarely convey: Myanmar's military — one of the most powerful in Southeast Asia, armed and funded for decades — is losing this war.

By late 2024, independent analysts estimated the junta controlled only about 21% of Myanmar's territory. Resistance forces — a coalition of ethnic armed organizations and People's Defence Forces made up largely of ordinary citizens — held roughly 42%, with the rest contested. For the first time in Myanmar's history, resistance fighters captured one of the military's 14 regional command headquarters, in the city of Lashio. These are not small symbolic victories. They represent a fundamental shift in the balance of power in a country where the military had held unchallenged dominance for sixty years.

This did not happen because of international intervention. It happened because Myanmar's own people decided to fight — and kept fighting even when the cost was nearly unbearable.

What This Courage Has Cost

The gains of the resistance have been paid for in blood, property, and the ordinary fabric of daily life. The military, unable to hold territory on the ground, has increasingly relied on airstrikes — bombing villages, towns, schools, hospitals, and markets from the air. It is a strategy designed to punish the civilian population for supporting the resistance, and it has caused suffering on a staggering scale.

Schools have been among the deliberate targets. Between 2021 and early 2025, international monitors verified more than 217 attacks on schools across Myanmar. In May 2025, a military airstrike hit a school in Sagaing Region during class hours, killing at least 20 students and 2 teachers. These are children. In classrooms. Killed by their own military.

Hospitals and clinics have been struck as well. Entire communities have watched their villages burned to the ground — homes, crops, livestock, and everything families had built over lifetimes — destroyed in a single operation. More than 125,000 teachers have lost their positions since 2021. Thirty-seven teachers have been killed. Five hundred have been arrested.

This is what it looks like when a military turns its weapons on its own people. And this is what the people of Myanmar have endured — and continue to endure — without surrendering.

A Nation in Need

The scale of human need in Myanmar today is difficult to comprehend. As of 2025, the United Nations estimates that more than 18 million people — roughly one in three people in the country — are in need of humanitarian assistance. That includes 6 million children. The UN has called for over $1 billion in emergency aid for 2025 alone. The total death toll from the conflict, including combatants on all sides, surpassed 100,000 by 2026, according to ACLED, the leading conflict data organization. More than 6,000 of those deaths were civilians confirmed killed directly by the military.

More than 3.5 million people have been displaced from their homes since the coup. Many are living in makeshift camps in jungle areas, in border regions, or sheltering with relatives in towns that may themselves be unsafe. Access to food, clean water, and medicine is uncertain for millions of families. In parts of Rakhine State, an estimated 1.6 million people have been cut off entirely from hospital care.

The economy has collapsed. The Myanmar currency lost much of its value in the years following the coup. Inflation has made basic goods unaffordable for ordinary families. The banking system has been disrupted. The middle class that was emerging during the 2015–2020 democratic period has been largely wiped out. Young people who had been building businesses, studying, and dreaming of a stable future have had those futures suspended — or destroyed.

A Generation at Risk

Perhaps no part of this crisis is more painful than what is happening to Myanmar's children. Education — which has been a deep cultural value in Myanmar for over a thousand years — has been one of the primary casualties of the conflict.

Schools across the country have been closed, bombed, occupied by soldiers, or simply abandoned because families have fled. In some areas, underground schools and home learning networks have emerged — parents and teachers finding ways to keep children learning even under impossible conditions, meeting in homes, in churches, in jungle clearings. This quiet determination to educate children even in the middle of a war is one of the most remarkable things happening in Myanmar today.

But the losses are real. A generation of children has had their education interrupted, their communities shattered, their childhoods marked by displacement and fear. The long-term consequences — for individual families and for Myanmar as a whole — will be felt for decades.

Ordinary People. Extraordinary Courage.

It is worth pausing to say this plainly: what the people of Myanmar have done since February 2021 is one of the most remarkable acts of collective courage in living memory.

They are not soldiers. The young people who formed the People's Defence Forces were, months earlier, students, office workers, shopkeepers, and teachers. They had no military training, no weapons, no international backing. They went into jungles and mountains, learned to fight, and took on a military that had ruled their country for sixty years. Many of them have died. Many more have been captured, tortured, or imprisoned. Entire families have paid the price for one member's decision to resist.

And still they have not stopped.

The Civil Disobedience Movement that began with doctors walking off the job has never fully ended. Medical workers still operate underground clinics. Government employees who refused to return to work under the junta still refuse. Artists, journalists, and educators have continued to create — from exile, from hiding, from wherever they can — because they believe that culture and truth are also forms of resistance.

Homes have been burned. Property has been taken. Schools have been bombed. Communities have been scattered to the hills. And the people of Myanmar have refused to call it the end. They have rebuilt, reorganized, and kept going — with a determination that is, in every honest sense of the word, heroic.

Present Through All of It

Strategic Global Missions has been in active partnership with indigenous Christian leaders in Myanmar since 2005 — long before the 2021 coup, through the years of military rule, through the brief democratic opening, and through everything that has happened since February 1, 2021.

We do not share specific operational details about our partners or their locations, because doing so could put them in danger. What we can say is this: the leaders we partner with are still there. They are still serving their communities. In some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable, they are providing care, maintaining community, and holding out the hope of the Gospel to people who have paid an enormous price for their faith and their freedom.

They do not need the world to feel sorry for them. They need partners who understand what they are facing, who will stand with them in prayer, who will provide the resources that allow the work to continue. That is what Strategic Global Missions has tried to do for twenty years. And it is what we intend to keep doing.