As Myanmar’s military ramps up its campaign of collective punishment and indiscriminate bombing, the people of Bago are turning their home region into a decisive front in the battle for Myanmar’s future. Driving across the dry, flat land along the Sittaung River in Bago Region reveals a very different front line of the revolution, far from the eastern borderlands 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 significant areas in the effort to overthrow the military junta that illegally seized power in 2021. Positioned between the Yangon, the country’s largest city, and the military capital Naypyidaw, it is a critical corridor. In recent years, revolutionary forces have carved out 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 medics treating the wounded in clandestine clinics, young soldiers confronting the regime, and civilians suffering from the junta’s escalating brutality.
The revolutionary movement that has arisen since 2021 is far from perfect, but it represents a legitimate people’s government confronting a military junta that illegally seized power and terrorizes its own population. The network of People’s Defense Forces (PDFs), operating under the National Unity Government alongside longstanding Karen resistance forces, now controls significant territory in Bago.
In these “liberated areas,” governance is real. The junta, however, is pushing back with force to regain the territory they lost in the past years. It has intensified attacks on civilian populations and relies on an extensive network of informants in Bago to track 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 aircraft have been used to bomb peaceful gatherings and vital civilian infrastructure – including schools, hospitals, religious sites, and homes – in attacks aiming to instill terror in communities sympathetic to the resistance. Residents in Bago are bearing the brunt of junta abuses. On March 5, junta soldiers surrounded Yae Twin Kone village tract, trapping residents for several days inside the area. The ordeal ended in tragedy when the military called in an airstrike on a Buddhist monastery in the area and shot at civilians, killing more than 25 people.
So Daw, a PDF commander, described to me the high-stakes rescue mission launched on March 7, after he learned that the civilians were being held hostage by the military. Although successful, he noted the rescue operation was “extremely risky,” a sentiment that underscores the precarious reality for forces on the ground.
A commando from the PDF Spring Warrior Column described how they entered the village after 10 p.m. to push junta forces out and rescue the civilian hostages. As the military retreated, the fighters supported civilians fleeing. “I was guiding them,” the PDF soldier told me from a makeshift clinic bed, where he was recovering from wounds sustained just a week after the rescue. “Children were holding my hands as I led them out. We carried an older, wounded woman on a stretcher made from bamboo and a longyi.”
Weeks after the rescue, my colleagues and I at Fortify Rights interviewed survivors of the detention and subsequent junta bombing. One man recounted being bound and forced to the ground by soldiers. As he lay there, he heard the crackle of the military’s radio: “We shot one kid,” a soldier reported. Only later did the man realize they were talking about having killed his son.
On March 6, the junta granted him permission to go to the Buddhist monastery where the airstrike had hit. There, he found his wife among the ruins. The military allowed the survivors to bury the more than 25 civilians killed in the strike and shootings in the the area in two mass graves.
“I carried my wife’s dead body,” he told us. “I carried my son also to the burial area.”
The attack was not a mistake, or a case of civilians killed in the crossfire; it was a purposeful attack on civilians seeking refuge at 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. The motive, he believed, was clear: “The military wanted us to stop supporting the resistance.”
Incidents like these reveal the military’s broader strategy of collective punishment, which is aimed at breaking the civilian support for the revolutionary forces. Throughout areas of Myanmar controlled by these forces, the military junta bombs civilians on an almost daily basis, seeking to punish them for their resistance.
Yet years on, the pro-democracy movement in Bago and other regions of Myanmar endures, and the people of Myanmar are determined in their struggle to rid the country of its brutal, corrupt, and murderous military.
The struggle in Bago gets to the heart of who will govern Myanmar and what the future of Myanmar will look like. The people in these villages, as in many areas of Myanmar, are keeping the revolution alive through a steadfast fight against dictatorship.
