What are the most important questions hanging over Myanmar’s civil war may be posed in a moment of sharpening fighting in the dry season: What are the corporate intentions of the Arakan Army, the world’s alleged insurgent kingmaker?
Having secured dominance over its western seaboard homeland of Rakhine state in over a year of bitter combat, the ethnic Rakhine AA is today unique amid a plethora of ethnic minority armies and mostly ethnic Bamar Peoples Defense Forces ( PDFs ) battling the military’s State Administration Council ( SAC ) regime.
It is the only force in the nation that successfully combines the military might, the geographical perspective, and, critically, the strategic autonomy with regard to domestic and international actors to quickly tip Myanmar’s military checkerboard in one way or another.
How this army of an estimated 30, 000 or more battle-hardened forces led by a charismatic 46-year-old Myanmar republican, Twan Mrat Naing, moves in the coming days may shape the future of a national fight that since the February 2021 military revolution has literally torn the country off, forcing well over 3 million from their homes and livelihoods.
Two more important sides
Following a season and a half of unrelenting hostilities that began in Myanmar on November 13, 2023, as part of a broader strategy mounted with its north Kokang andTa’ang rebel allies, the AA has nearly completed its mission of ejecting SAC forces from the totality of Rakhine condition.
However, it continues to work on two geographically distinct fronts, including the state capital of Sittwe and a coastal enclave in the Bay of Bengal that includes Kyaukphyu town, the nearby Danyawady naval base, and a Chinese-built deep-sea port and special economic zone ( SEZ ) at the southern terminal of natural gas and oil pipelines stretching northward.
( A third regime-held township on Manaung island is essentially irrelevant to wider military calculations. )
At the same time, since January this year, the AA and its PDF allies have opened an extended eastern front along and across the Arakan Yoma mountain range that divides Rakhine from Myanmar’s central heartland in Magwe, Bago and Ayeyarwady regions.
In light of this situation, it is unlikely that the AA’s leadership will have the manpower, logistical, or strategic resources to engage in a drawn-out two-front conflict.
Hard military logic dictates that to succeed on either front it will need to prioritize one or other of them. And the choice regarding which, perhaps already made, will have a significant impact on the national battlefield over the course of the year and beyond.
Coastal campaign
A major campaign to seize Sittwe and Kyaukphyu as far as possible before the monsoon rains in May would mean putting a focus on completing the historic mission of liberating the Rakhine state.
Minor forays into the national heartland on the eastern front might, meanwhile, serve to keep the increasingly thin-stretched military off-balance and distracted.
The capture of the state capital would have significant symbolic and political significance for a force that had been inspired and driven by a resurgent Rakhine nationalism since its founding in 2009, as a result of the army’s fall of its western Regional Military Command at Ann in central Rakhine last December.
The seizure of Kyaukphyu would imply control over the taps of offshore natural gas reserves that financially sustain the SAC’s war effort and the southern terminal of pipelines of vital importance to the economy of China’s landlocked southwestern region.  ,
On the other side of the ledger, any attempt to storm either enclave, let alone both, is fraught with risk. Both port towns are protected by substantial garrisons, each with a number of thousand troops, that are reinforced by sea and air, fighting against each other on their backs while receiving terrifying fire support from offshore naval assets and largely unchallenged air power.
The fates of other Rakhine coastal towns during the second half of 2024, notably Ngapali, Maungdaw, and the naval base at Maung Shwe Lay, suggest that AA forces might ultimately prevail.
The human cost would be brutal, with almost certainly casualties rising into the low thousands of killed and up to 10,000 wounded, aside from the drain on finite ammunition stocks at the end of uncertain logistics lines from northern Myanmar.
For an insurgent force that, since late 2023, has been embroiled in 15 months of unremitting combat and already suffered thousands of casualties, the prospect of further heavy losses will be sobering and perhaps prohibitive.
Even if the AA were to win, the AA would end up ruling over cities that had been reduced to rubble and had important economic infrastructures that needed to be rebuilt in ruins.
Eye on the heartland
The pivotal shift in the AA’s center of military gravitation would, according to Twan Mrat Naing and his military advisors, be the Ayeyarwady River Valley and Delta regions, respectively, pushing the country’s industrial and agricultural nerve centers away from the coast to the extended eastern front along the Arakan Yoma.
Maintaining a minimal level of activity around Sittwe and Kyaukphyu without attempting to storm either town would, meanwhile, serve to tie down army garrisons and discourage any possible counter-offensives into already liberated territory.
An eastern campaign has a lot to recommend it from a strictly military standpoint. Most obviously, the relatively short distances from the watershed of the Arakan Yoma down into the Ayeyarwady River valley means important targets and communication nodes can be reached rapidly.
The eastern front’s 350 kilometers of potential or actual axes of main advance, which complicate regime responses, also benefit from this fact.
Were the AA to infiltrate large raiding columns off-road to sow chaos between and behind regime defensive concentrations, the military could find itself struggling to react in an even more confused and challenging battlespace.
The eastern front, in addition to being geographical, also has the significant benefit of military burden-sharing with allied Chin and Bamar PDFs operating under AA control and control.
Tentative advances since January will already have underscored SAC vulnerabilities on the eastern front. Along the route from Taungup on the Rakhine coast to Padaung on the Ayeyarwady River, under the leadership of AA-led forces, Ngape township on the highway between Ann and Minbu in the Magwe region, as well as further south along the Ayeyarwady River.
On both axes, resistance forces are already threatening logistically vital military-industrial plants run by the army’s Directorate of Defense Industries or Ka Pa Sa in its Burmese acronym.
The small but crucially important municipality of Okeshittpin is immediately in danger in the upcoming days. Situated at the intersection of the east-west Taungup–Padaung road and the main north-south highway along the western bank of the Ayeyarwady, the town sits at the center of a cluster of Ka Pa Sa factories and is less than half an hour’s drive from the river.
Its capture by AA forces who were already moving out of the hills would be a major shock to Naypyidaw.
More widely dispersed probing attacks into the Delta rice basket are similarly moving east, with clashes shifting from a coastal strip where the AA was vulnerable to naval bombardment to a crescent of three inland townships running north-south between Lemyethna, Yegyi and Thabaung.
Army defenses have always relied on air support, which has always seemed to be mostly ineffective.
Redrawing maps
If the military benefits of the still making tentative moves along the eastern front are becoming more apparent, their longer-term political implications are undoubtedly more complicated.
For the AA to throw its weight behind a campaign along multiple axes of advance into the national heartland implies a strategy that goes well beyond liberating Rakhine and staking a claim to full autonomy.
The AA would automatically play a central and even decisive role in shaping the nation’s future given the fragility of the military regime and the geography of Rakhine State. In a word, a “kingmaker”.
This is not a prospect that the AA leadership has ever shied away from, at least rhetorically. In comments to The Irrawaddy online magazine in 2024, Twan Mrat Naing noted pointedly that “on a local scale limiting ourselves to our immediate ambitions without considering the broader context would undermine our success. We must adopt a holistic perspective that considers both the union as a whole and the environment in general.
In framing AA war objectives and the dangers of the future resurgence of a rump military regime, AA spokesman Khaing Tu Kha has been less diplomatic:” Only when the fascist regime is wiped off Myanmar’s map will people be guaranteed safety”.
In remarks made last year to local media, he added:” I would like to stress that we can only secure freedom and safety once the regime is completely overthrown.”
Today, military developments have caught up with and perhaps even overtaken political rhetoric. If the AA’s eastern front’s advances actually gain momentum, their cumulative strategic and political effects are likely to have the same impact on the civil war’s trajectory as the dramatic gains made by the” 1027″ campaign in the north Shan state and northern Mandalay region.
Certainly, the proposition that after having lost Myanmar’s borderlands the SAC could fall back into a defensible “heartland fortress” – always delusional but widely touted since late 2023 – would be finally and unceremoniously buried. Evidence enough would be provided by the shock of Rakhine-led forces severing major western communication channels and encircling the Delta ricebasket.  ,
The purported “fortress” would be split squarely across the middle if those advancements were paralleled by a link-up between the AA and elements of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA ) across the central Bago Yoma spine of mountains.
That link-up north of Yangon is arguably only a few months away as KNLA-led operations in the Sittaung Valley, which connects Yangon and Naypyidaw east of the Bago Yoma, gain momentum.
At the same time, reinforced AA thrusts into the Ayeyarwady valley would undoubtedly galvanize and accelerate anti-SAC resistance across north-central Myanmar with ripple effects spreading from Magwe east into the Anyar dry zone between Naypyidaw and Mandalay.
Sweat on the brow of China
None of these developments will be received as good news in Beijing, where since August 2024, the Chinese government has thrown its support behind the SAC.
Chinese diplomats have struggled to impose ceasefires in northern Myanmar in what may be regarded as a seriously flawed misreading of the national battlefield dynamics in an effort to ensure the regime’s survival as a guarantor, however unlikely, of Myanmar’s border stability, Myanmar’s economic holdings, and the Belt and Road Initiative’s expansive geostrategic ambitions.
Even in the north where Chinese influence is at its most coercive, those efforts have met with pushback. The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army ( MNDAA ), which is based in Kokang, agreed to a ceasefire in January, but has continued to object to demands that it should now simply hand it back to the SAC Lashio, the city on China’s main trading route, after a month of bloody fighting.
To date, at least, Beijing’s efforts to broker or enforce a peace between the military and another AA ally, theTa’ang National Liberation Army ( TNLA ), dominant across northwestern townships of Shan state near the Chinese border, have proved entirely fruitless.
The SAC has launched a terror campaign of airstrikes specifically against civilians in towns held by the TNLA and its PDF allies who are directly on the front lines, despite the TNLA’s showing of no inclination to leave Mogok, north of Mandalay, which it captured in July 2024.
Operating some 600 kilometers from the Chinese border and locked in daily clashes with SAC forces, the AA is even less vulnerable to Chinese strong-arm tactics than its northern allies.
Indeed, the fact that hostilities have recently erupted around Kyaukphyu, the jewel in China’s Myanmar crown, where the state-owned CITIC group is building a deep-sea port and SEZ, has only served to underscore the limits of Chinese influence over the AA.