Myanmar’s resistance movement is turning violent

UNTIL FEBRUARY 1ST, when General Min Aung Hlaing mugged his country by ousting the civilian government, Zaw Maung Myint (not his real name) was just another urban youth with soft hands and a penchant for social media. Not long ago, however, he slipped into the jungles of Myanmar’s borderlands. There he has been receiving military training from one of the country’s powerful ethnic armies that have long waged war against the Tatmadaw, as the Burmese army is known, and even from defectors from the Tatmadaw itself. Living on bamboo-shoots and fish paste, Zaw Maung Myint is training to be a sniper. “If someone asked me what I wanted most, I would say: ‘Guns!’”