Photo Essay: Between battles in central Myanmar

A resistance fighter takes position with a belt-fed weapon behind a damaged wall near the frontline in Myaing Township, Magway Region. In Myanmar’s central dry zone, resistance fighters are trying to hold back a major military offensive advancing towards the oilfields of Myaing Township in Magway Region.Photographed near the frontline, the fighters move through fields and wooded terrain carrying rifles, ammunition, radios and improvised equipment. Between movements, they gather beneath trees to communicate, study information, and coordinate their next steps. The images also capture the human cost of the fighting: wounded resistance members are carried from the battlefield and treated in makeshift conditions, while exhausted fighters rest before returning to their positions. The scenes unfold amid a months-long junta offensive targeting an area of considerable strategic and economic importance. Hundreds of barrels of oil are produced each day around Myaing, where resistance authorities collect taxes on production to help finance their operations. Junta forces have used heavy weapons and repeated airstrikes as they attempt to push deeper into the area. These photographs offer a close view of the resistance confronting that offensive—through moments of preparation and movement, injury and exhaustion, communication and camaraderie—as fighters try to hold territory that has become an important source of revenue for the anti-junta movement. (Photos: Tin Soe / Myanmar Now) An injured resistance fighter is helped by his comrades after being brought from the fighting in Myaing Township. More than two dozen civilians, including elderly people and people displaced by earlier fighting, have reportedly been killed since the operation began in mid-May. More than 300 homes have been burned, while tens of thousands of residents from more than 20 villages in Myaing Township have fled, according to local sources. Burned trees and collapsed sheets of corrugated metal are all that remain of homes destroyed in the village. The body of an elderly man who was unable to flee when junta troops stormed a village in Myaing Township. Old banknotes lie scattered across the floor of a Buddhist monastery in Myaing Township after junta soldiers ransacked the monastery and broke open a donation box, leaving behind notes that were no longer in use.

Photo Essay: Between battles in central Myanmar

As junta forces push towards oil-producing areas of Magway Region’s Myaing Township, photographs from near the frontline document the resistance fighters trying to hold them back

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