Arakan Army
The Arakan Insurgent Army released a video of its capture of the barracks
The end, as far as the BGP5 barracks were concerned, was loud and brutal. First, a cracking orator calling for their surrender; then, a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifles that tore into pieces the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.
BGP5 – the letters stand for Border Guard Police – was the Myanmar military junta's last stand in northern Rakhine state, located along the border with Bangladesh.
Video from the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) that was besieging the base shows its motley, mostly barefoot fighters firing an assortment of weapons at the base, while Arakan Air Force planes air roars above their heads.
It was a fierce battle – perhaps the bloodiest in the civil war that has ravaged Myanmar since the military seized power in a 2021 coup.
“They had dug deep ditches filled with spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.
“There were bunkers and reinforced buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs and even their lives trying to get through.”
For the putschist, General Min Aung Hlaing, it is a new humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.
For the first time, his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270 kilometers separating Myanmar and Bangladesh are now entirely under AA control.
And with only Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, still firmly in the hands of the military, although cut off from the rest of the country, the AA will likely be the first insurgent group to take full control of a state .
The army has been retreating against the Arakan army since the beginning of the year, losing city after city.
The last army units withdrew in September to BGP5, a compound covering about 20 hectares just outside the border town of Maungdaw, where the AA has been besieging it.
BGP5 was built on the site of a Rohingya Muslim village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by armed forces in 2017.
It was the first of many burned villages I saw during a visit to Maungdaw just after the military operation in September of that year, a mass of charred debris amid lush tropical vegetation, its inhabitants killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.
When I returned two years later, the new police compound was already built, all the trees removed, giving the defenders a clear view of any attacking force.
The AA source told us that their progress towards this area was extremely slow, forcing the insurgents to dig their own ditches for cover.
He does not publish his own losses. But judging by the intensity of the fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely that he lost hundreds of his own soldiers.
Throughout the siege, the Myanmar Air Force continued to constantly bomb Maungdaw, driving the remaining civilians from the town.
His planes dropped supplies overnight to besieged soldiers, but it was never enough. They had plenty of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not get any treatment for their wounds and the soldiers were demoralized.
They started visiting last weekend.
An AA video shows them coming out in a pitiful state, waving white clothes. Some limp on makeshift crutches or hop around, their injured legs wrapped in rags. Few people wear shoes.
Inside the destroyed buildings, the victorious insurgents filmed piles of corpses.
The AA says more than 450 soldiers died during the siege. It released images of the captured commander, Brigadier General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling under the flagpole, now flying the insurgent banner.
Arakan Army
Brigadier General Thurein Tun (center) appeared as a prisoner in Arakan Army footage.
Pro-military commentators in Myanmar expressed their frustration on social media.
“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your children to serve in the army,” one wrote. “Is this how you are using us? Are you happy to see all these deaths in Rakhine?”
“At this rate, all that will remain of the Tatmadaw (military) will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.
The capture of BGP5 also shows that the Arakan Army is one of Myanmar's most effective fighting forces.
Formed only in 2009 – much later than most of Myanmar's other insurgent groups – by young ethnic Rakhine men who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, the AA is part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance that has inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.
The other two members of the alliance remained on the border in Shan State.
But the AA returned to Rakhine eight years ago to launch its armed campaign for self-governance, exploiting the historic resentment of the Rakhine population over poverty, isolation and neglect by the central government in with regard to his state.
AA leaders proved to be intelligent, disciplined, and capable of motivating their fighters.
They already administer and control large areas of Rakhine State as if they were running their own state.
And they also have good weapons, thanks to their ties to older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and appear well financed.
There remains, however, a more important question: the extent to which different insurgent ethnic groups are willing to prioritize the goal of overthrowing the military junta.
They publicly say they are doing so, alongside the shadow government that was toppled by the coup and the hundreds of volunteer popular defense forces that rose to support it.
In return for the support it receives from ethnic insurgents, the shadow government promises a new federal political system that will give autonomy to Myanmar's regions.
But already, the other two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance have accepted China's request for a ceasefire.
China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war that would almost certainly leave the military with much of its power intact.
Getty Images
The fighting has left much of Rakhine state in ruins, such as the village of Myo Thu Gy, which was burned down by the army in 2017.
The opposition insists the army must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made numerous territorial gains at the junta's expense, ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China's blessing rather than continue fighting to oust the generals.
The AA's victory raises more worrying questions.
The group's leaders remain discreet about their projects. But he is taking over a state which has always been poor and which has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of the past year.
“Eighty percent of homes in Maungdaw and surrounding villages have been destroyed,” a Rohingya who recently left Maungdaw for Bangladesh told the BBC.
“The town is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”
Last month, the United Nations, whose agencies have little access to Rakhine state, warned of a looming famine, due to the large number of displaced people and the difficulty of getting supplies in, despite the military blockade.
The AA is trying to set up its own administration, but some people displaced by the fighting have told the BBC the group cannot feed or shelter them.
It is also unclear how the AA will deal with the Rohingya population, still estimated to number around 600,000 in Rakhine even after the expulsion of 700,000 people in 2017.
Most live in northern Rakhine state, and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the ethnic Rakhine majority, the AA's support base, have long been strained.
The situation is now much worse since Rohingya militant groups, who have their power base in Bangladesh's vast refugee camps, chose to side with the military, against the AA, despite the country's track record. army regarding the persecution of the Rohingyas.
Many Rohingya dislike these groups, and some say they are happy to live in an AA-ruled Rakhine state.
But tens of thousands of people were expelled by the AA from the cities they conquered and were not allowed to return.
The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision of a future independent of central government, but it has also denounced the Rohingya whom it finds itself fighting alongside the army.
“We cannot deny the fact that the Rohingya have been persecuted by Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people have supported this,” said the Rohingya man we spoke with in Bangladesh.
“The government wants to prevent Rohingya from becoming citizens, but the people of Rakhine believe that there should be no Rohingya in Rakhine State. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the military junta regime.
