As the clock ticks down to the Myanmar military’s late-December election gambit, recent months have seen armed resistance to the junta suffer setbacks on multiple fronts. Notwithstanding sweeping popular rejection of fig-leaf polling crafted to entrench continued army rule, the coming months threaten to further tilt the battlefield balance against opposition forces.
In the crosshairs of an unfolding crisis with sobering implications for war in 2026 and beyond is the Rakhine nationalist Arakan Army (AA), the resistance’s most powerful actor and last man standing among the Brotherhood Alliance of three ethnic armies that surged to prominence in late 2023 and mid-2024 as the vanguard of national revolt against the coup regime.
Over 2025, the concerted pressure of China’s hard-knuckle diplomatic interventions and logistics embargos backstopping the kinetic campaigns of a resurgent military, or Tatmadaw, has forced two of the brothers into ceasefires and humiliating surrenders of northern towns they had captured last year.
At year’s end, with the Chinese-Kokang Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the ethnic Palaung Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) effectively out of the fight on critical northeastern fronts, the same pressure is now turning ineluctably against the AA on Myanmar’s western seaboard.
Since a string of dramatic victories between November 2023 and December 2024 that saw the AA take control of all but three of Rakhine 17 townships, the group’s political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), has established expanding administrative structures under its Arakan Peoples’ Revolutionary Government (APRG).
Twan Mrat Naing, commander-in-chief of the Arakan Army, attends a meeting of leaders of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups at the United Wa State Army headquarters in Myanmar’s northern Shan state, May 6, 2015. Photo: Twitter
Meanwhile the army —a well-organized force loosely estimated at around 40,000 troops led by a charismatic commander, Twan Mrat Naing and underpinned by a conscription system —stands today as Myanmar’s largest non-state armed actor.
Based on training programs and logistical support, AA linkages with an array of ethnic Bamar resistance organizations beyond its home base, also give the Rakhine revolutionaries real reach into Myanmar’s central heartlands and a potentially key political role on the country’s ethnically fragmented checkerboard.
The Kyaukphyu key
Notwithstanding these strengths, exactly one year after overrunning the Tatmadaw’s Western Regional Military Command at Ann, the AA juggernaut is now staring down the barrel of a crisis rooted in a slow geostrategic encirclement —military, economic and diplomatic —that it proved unable to break out of in 2025.
As was the case with its northern allies, the most immediate manifestation of the AA’s dilemma has been its powerlessness in the face repeated attacks mounted by the Myanmar Air Force (MAF) against Rakhine’s civilian population.
Condemned by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and United Nations, the MAF’s most egregious war crime to date unfolded late in the evening of December 11, with a precisely targeted airstrike on the main hospital of Mrauk U, the ancient capital of the Rakhine kingdom.
In pointed contravention of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the attack on a clearly civilian medical facility killed 33 and wounded over 70 patients, relatives and staff.
But a broader catalyst behind the looming predicament facing the AA has been the apparent failure of a months-long bid to seize the vital Rakhine port of Kyaukphyu, on the northern tip of Ramree Island. Launched in July 2025, that campaign was launched in open defiance of China’s preference that the town remain under junta control.
One of the three townships still held by the Tatmadaw —along with the state capital, Sittwe, and offshore Manaung island —Kyaukphyu is of critical international importance: first, as the coastal terminus of natural gas and oil pipelines stretching from the Bay of Bengal to fuel the economy of much of southwest China; and second, as the site of a multibillion-dollar Chinese deep-sea port and special economic zone (SEZ) project on nearby Maday Island.
The capture of Kyaukphyu offered the AA the possibility of a radical reset of the strategic balance well beyond Rakhine itself. While denying the military a vital revenue stream, it stood to raise the AA’s profile as an international actor that China would have had no choice but to recognize and do business with.
In addition to hugely complicating the uneasy alliance between Beijing and the shaky military regime in Naypyidaw, that realignment would also have reshaped relationships on the AA’s western flank with an increasingly hostile Bangladesh and an India unwilling to deal openly with the AA for fear of jeopardizing ties with Naypyidaw.
However, despite some six months of brutally costly hostilities that brought AA forces to within artillery range of Kyaukphyu town and its adjacent airport and threatened the Dhanyawady naval base, the sheer weight of Tatmadaw firepower appears finally to have prevailed.
Under relentless attrition by Tatmadaw ground units reinforced by sea and backed by a withering rain of airstrikes and offshore naval fire support, Rakhine nationalist forces have slowly fallen back to positions around 10-15 kilometers from the frontlines of July and August.
Amid reportedly intense ongoing clashes, the possibility of a sudden reversal of the situation in the coming weeks is not inconceivable but, realistically, is unlikely. Indeed, AA commanders may increasingly need to consider the threat of the Tatmadaw using Kyaukphyu’s reinforced garrison as a beachhead from which to retake the whole of Ramree island and then punch into AA-controlled central Rakhine.
Inland front
At the same time, AA advances across the Arakan Yoma mountain range into Myanmar’s central heartland that began in January have scored only mixed success and have not translated into a strategic game-changer.
Supported by local Chin and Bamar People’s Defense Forces (PDFs), AA thrusts into the valleys of the Ayeyarwady and Pathein rivers have focused largely on three axes of advance: from Ann towards the Ayeyarwady and Minbu town in Magwe region; from Taungup further south towards the Ayeyarwady at Padaung and Pyay in Bago region; and from Gwa in southernmost Rakhine towards the townships of Yegyi, Lemyethna and Thabaung on the Pathein River.
Sporadic hostilities along all three axes continue. Tellingly, however, after months of breathless expectancy in the media, AA-led forces have to date failed to overrun any of the string of military-industrial plants run by the Directorate of Defense Industries (DDI), better known by its Burmese acronym, Ka Pa Sa, scattered along the west bank of the Ayeyarwady.
With Kyaukphyu still in regime hands, operations east of the mountains now look increasingly like an effort to relieve the economic blockade on AA-run Rakhine and to preempt any major Tatmadaw campaign in the coming dry season using troops freed up by the northeast ceasefires.
Meanwhile, in northern Rakhine state, the AA faces the growing destabilization of the majority-Muslim townships of Maungdaw and Buthidaung by a coterie of militant-cum-criminal Rohingya factions that has grown notably since mid-2025.
Based in the sprawling refugee camps south of Cox’s Bazaar, groups such as the Arakan Rohingya Solidarity Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) have stepped up cross-border raids with the evident concurrence, if not support, of Bangladeshi military intelligence.
The extent to which Dhaka’s Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) views the Rohingya factions as tools to pressure the AA toward an eventual repatriation of over 1 million Rohingya refugees or, even more ambitiously, as a force to carve out a future Rohingya autonomous zone, remains unclear. It may indeed remain unclear even at DGFI headquarters.
What at least one regional intelligence service that spoke to Asia Times views as well-established fact, however, is that the recent uptick in raids into the northern townships by Rohingya proxy groups now using support weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades reflects a tactical alliance of convenience between DGFI and Tatmadaw intelligence aimed at tying down and undermining the AA.
Against this ominous backdrop, it has become increasingly clear that the AA finds itself in a dangerously tight strategic cul-de-sac, precisely at a time when in it will face growing logistics constraints in 2026.
Even as the vast quantities of munitions captured in 2024 have been —and will continue to be —slowly expended, traditional arms conduits from allies and commercial partners in northern Myanmar are now drying up under mounting Chinese pressure.
Painful options
Hindsight vision, as the saying goes, is always 20/20. But in retrospect, it is difficult to escape a bitter conclusion: the AA’s failure to prioritize the capture of Kyaukphyu earlier in 2025 —focusing the bulk of its resources against the port before Naypyidaw had time to recover from its debacles of 2024, reinforce the garrison and benefit from the northern ceasefires —may prove to have been one the most consequential strategic errors of Myanmar’s civil war.
Myanmar’s insurgent Arakan Army has deployed hit-and-run tactics the military has found difficult to counter and combat. Photo: Twitter
From the position of strength it enjoyed in early 2025, the Rakhine army appeared to waver between two options that offered the possibility of breaking out of its strategic encirclement: a coastal strategy targeted squarely on the geopolitical prize of Kyaukphyu, or an inland strategy aimed at pushing into the national heartland to reinforce and galvanize ethnic Bamar PDFs. In the upshot, AA leadership appears to have attempted to move on both fronts, deploying too little too late and failing to achieve a decisive breakout on either.
One year later the AA leadership confronts two very different options. The first is broadly a fighting retreat in the coming months as the Tatmadaw opens campaigns of attrition backed by intensive deployments of airpower aimed at retaking territory and reducing AA combat capability piecemeal.
Advances into Rakhine, which will inevitably cost both sides dearly, could be launched either from the beachheads of Kyaukphyu and Sittwe, or along the axes across the Arakan Yoma, or, most probably, from both directions at roughly the same time.
The alternative and certainly less costly option would be to bow to Chinese pressure and, like its two Brotherhood allies, submit to a ceasefire. This would not be the first time Twan Mrat Naing has reached ceasefires with the Tatmadaw. Both before and after the 2021 coup, the AA used extended ceasefires to regroup and later return to the fight at times of its own choosing.
This time around, however, the differences would be stark. Backed by China, Russia and its own growing manpower, the military would be in the ascendant and, emboldened by its experiences in the north, would almost certainly demand the surrender of key towns. For the AA, still trapped in a geographical and logistical vice, any eventual return to war would offer little or no prospect of improving on its current predicament.
It hardly needs to be added that beyond Rakhine, the neutralization of the single largest, best-equipped and most cohesive force challenging military rule would deal a predictably disastrous blow, psychological as much as military, to resistance forces fighting elsewhere across Myanmar.
