Following defeat, junta-backed warlord returns from China to Myanmar capital

Military-allied border militia commander Zahkung Ting Ying has reportedly come back to Myanmar this month after the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) captured the territory under his control in November, forcing him to flee to China. Earlier this month Zahkung Ting Ying left Tengchong—the city in China’s Yunnan Province where he was taking refuge—before flying on a Chinese airline to the junta’s administrative capital of Naypyitaw, according to a source in Laiza, Kachin State, the site of the KIA’s headquarters. On Wednesday afternoon, photos appeared on a pro-junta propaganda channel on Telegram, which showed Zahkung Ting Ying meeting with the Myanmar military regime’s minister for border affairs, Lt-Gen Tun Tun Naung, in Naypyitaw. His motives for flying to the capital and meeting with the junta minister are unconfirmed. According to the source in Kachin State, Zahkung Ting Ying has a house in Tengchong, the Chinese city nearest to the towns of Pangwa (Pang War) and Kanpaikti, Kachin State, which KIA-led forces captured in recent months. Along with the towns of Chipwe and Tsawlaw, Pangwa and the border trade hub of Kanpaikti are located within an area of eastern Kachin State historically known as “Special Region 1.” For more than a decade, the area was effectively under the control of Zahkung Ting Ying and the three Border Guard Force (BGF) militia battalions under his command. In addition to its strategic location on the China-Myanmar border, mining sites in Special Region 1 are a vital source of lucrative rare earth minerals. According to a report published by the investigative group Global Witness in May of this year, Myanmar’s trade in heavy rare earth elements had a total value of US $1.4 billion in 2023, including exports of heavy rare earth oxides from Myanmar to China totalling more than 40,000 tonnes.The KIA and its allies took over Chipwe, Pangwa, and Tsawlaw in October of this year, also taking control of most of the rare earth mining sites. The anti-junta forces completed their takeover of Special Region 1 when they captured the border town of Kanpaikti on November 20. Just over a week later, the KIA declared that the ‘Special Region’ designation was abolished and inaugurated its own administration in the area. Zahkung Ting Ying, 84, is a former member of the Kachin Independence Organisation—the ethnic organisation for which the KIA operates as an armed wing—but split from the group in 1968 to join the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), operating in CPB Military Region 101 near the Chinese border. Following the collapse of the CPB in 1989, CPB Military Region 101 was redesignated as Kachin Special Region 1 in 1990, at which time the battalions under Zahkung Ting Ying’s command reorganised as the New Democratic Army-Kachin (NDA-K). In 2009, Zahkung Ting Ying's NDA-K was among the ethnic armed groups that accepted the Myanmar military’s proposal to reconstitute themselves as Border Guard Forces (BGF) operating within the military’s command structure. Zahkhung Ting Ying later stood for parliament as an independent candidate in Myanmar’s 2010 general elections, winning a seat in the Amyotha Hluttaw representing a constituency comprising Chipwe, Tsawlaw, and Injangyang townships. He won again in the 2015 elections, but was expelled from parliament the next year after the Union Election Commission ruled that he had broken election rules, including prohibitions against the physical intimidation of rival candidates.

Following defeat, junta-backed warlord returns from China to Myanmar capital

Zahkung Ting Ying, the leader of a junta-allied border guard force who was defeated and driven into China by the advancing Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and its allies last month, has flown to Naypyitaw and met with the junta’s border affairs minister

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