Myanmar

In late March, a devastating earthquake hit Myanmar’s Mandalay region, claiming thousands of lives and worsening an already severe humanitarian and political crisis. Since the February 2021 military coup, the country has faced escalating insecurity, economic paralysis, and failing healthcare systems. While military leader Min Aung Hlaing has pledged elections by the end of 2025, doubts persist over whether such a vote would be either credible or inclusive.

The catastrophe has drawn comparisons to Cyclone Nargis, which tore through the Irrawaddy Delta in May 2008 and left over 130,000 people dead or missing. Back then, the ruling junta, known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), delayed aid, blocked international relief workers, and diverted supplies intended for victims.

The World Food Programme temporarily halted operations after its assistance was seized. Even as the humanitarian emergency deepened, the regime proceeded with a constitutional referendum, prompting widespread condemnation abroad.

Mounting global pressure led to limited concessions. Ban Ki-moon, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, traveled to Myanmar and secured a narrow opening for foreign relief workers. Still, international military or direct emergency teams were barred from operating on the ground. That episode remains a powerful example of how authoritarian systems can worsen natural disasters through political control.

In contrast, the current leadership responded to the 2025 earthquake with a rare public appeal for international help. Governments quickly signaled support, and messages of solidarity circulated on social platforms.

Yet many inside Myanmar, particularly resistance groups and civil society, remain suspicious of any cooperation with the military regime. Carefully coordinated humanitarian aid, if transparent and neutral, might serve as leverage to demand more accountable governance, including fair elections.

However, access to the most affected zones—especially those under opposition control—remains highly restricted. Allegations of aid obstruction continue to surface. Meanwhile, military strikes in quake-stricken regions have drawn sharp rebukes from rights monitors.

The military’s election pledge has raised concern, not least because it maintains limited territorial control. Opposition entities like the National Unity Government (NUG) have rejected any vote managed by the junta as illegitimate.

Within the country, tensions are intensifying. Public distrust of international engagement with the regime is widespread, even when it’s justified by humanitarian intent. For donors and NGOs, the challenge is to support the people without reinforcing military authority.

ASEAN, long hesitant to interfere in member states’ domestic affairs, now faces a pivotal moment. The scale of suffering and regional instability is testing that principle. Frustration with Myanmar’s defiance is growing, particularly in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Despite the tragedy, the earthquake may present a diplomatic opening—one where humanitarian priorities could help unlock political change. But that opportunity hinges on bold and coordinated pressure by regional and international stakeholders. Myanmar’s suffering demands more than sympathy—it demands strategy.

A Myanmar military jet crashed on Tuesday in Sagaing Region, an area that has seen intense fighting during Myanmar’s civil war. The military blamed engine failure, while a rebel group claimed it shot down the plane.

Lin Latt Shwe, 6, was detained along with her mother and other suspects in the killing of a retired general in Yangon.

Security forces in Myanmar have arrested a six-year-old girl, along with 15 other people suspected of involvement in the assassination of a retired army officer last month, state-run media report.

The 16 suspects – 13 males and three females – were arrested in four different regions of the country late last month, the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar said on Friday.

Those arrested include Lin Latt Shwe, the six-year-old daughter of the alleged assassin, Myo Ko Ko, who was reported to have at least three other aliases. The newspaper report said the child and her parents were arrested in the central city of Bagan.

A little-known armed group calling itself the Golden Valley Warriors claimed responsibility for killing retired Brigadier General Cho Tun Aung, 68, who was shot outside his home in Yangon, the country’s commercial capital, on May 22.

Other detainees include the owner of a private hospital, which is alleged to have provided treatment to the assassin, who, according to the newspaper report, suffered a gunshot wound during the attack.

Independent news outlet The Irrawaddy said the Golden Valley Warriors have denied that the 16 people detained were part of their operation.

The junta has arrested 16 people including a 6-year-old girl on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of retired Brig-Gen Cho Tun Aung in Yangon on May 22. Golden Valley Warriors claimed responsibility and said the 16 are not related to them. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar pic.twitter.com/dtTCEJ1bF0

— The Irrawaddy (Eng) (@IrrawaddyNews) June 6, 2025

The killing of Cho Tun Aung, who was a former ambassador to Cambodia, is the latest attack against figures linked to the ruling military who launched a takeover of the country in 2021 after deposing the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Since the coup and the outbreak of the civil war in Myanmar, targeted assassinations have been carried out against high-ranking active and retired military officers, as well as senior civil servants, local officials, business associates of the ruling generals and suspected informers.

Soon after carrying out the assassination, the Golden Valley Warriors said in a statement posted on Facebook that Cho Tun Aung had been teaching internal security and counterterrorism at Myanmar’s National Defence College and was, by his actions, complicit in atrocities committed by the military in the ongoing civil war.

Southern Shan State, Myanmar – Tian Win Nang squats on the hard-packed earth, balancing a kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of chocolate-coloured raw opium in each hand like a human weighing scales.

“Each kilogramme is worth around $250,” said Tian Win Nang, wearing worn white flip-flops and a black T-shirt.

The son of poppy farmers, Tian Win Nang appears to be barely out of his teens.

“Chinese traders pay us in advance for the harvest,” he said, showing Al Jazeera three dinner-plate-sized mounds of opium.

“We don’t know what happens after,” he says of the journey that will see the opium go “north to the labs” where it will be processed into morphine and eventually refined into heroin.

“We do this to survive,” he adds.

The sun is high and the air is still in the poppy fields blanketing the hills in this part of southern Shan State in eastern Myanmar.

Men and women, young and old, their faces shielded with scarves and straw hats, move with quick, practised motions as hands use sharp tools to score green poppy pods before silently progressing on to another plant.

A milky fluid slowly oozes from the wound inflicted on the pod. When it has dried to the consistency of gum, the same hands will scrape off the sticky substance, gather it together and leave it to dry in the sun until it reaches the toffee-like consistency of raw opium.

This is a daily ritual for many farmers in this part of Shan State near where drug shipments have flowed along these mountain roads near the town of Pekon for decades. The routes wind towards the borders with neighbouring Thailand, Laos and China.

Armed conflict between Myanmar’s military and ethnic armed organisations in these regions has fuelled opium farming and drug production for generations, but the trade has surged in step with the country’s intensifying civil war.

Alliances have long existed, experts say, between high-ranking Myanmar military officers, ethnic armed groups, local criminal networks and transnational syndicates that handle the drug trade’s logistics, refining and distribution.

“Drug trafficking in Myanmar has been facilitated by the military since the 1990s,” said Mark Farmaner, director of the London-based Advance Myanmar charity and an expert on Southeast Asia. “Many officers profit personally, and the institution as a whole reaps political advantages,” he said.

One of the most powerful regional syndicates is Sam Gor, a sprawling network made up of an alliance of rival Chinese triad gangs that operates across China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and beyond.

Despite the 2021 arrest and extradition to Australia of Tse Chi Lop – a Canadian national of Chinese origin widely believed to be the leader of Sam Gor – the network remains largely intact.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the Sam Gor syndicate generated at least $8bn – and possibly as much as $17.7bn – in 2018 from controlling between 40 and 70 percent of the wholesale methamphetamine market in the Asia Pacific region.

Despite the high-profile arrest of Tse Chi Lop, the regional drug trade is flourishing with more than 1.1 billion methamphetamine pills seized across Southeast Asia in 2023 – a historic record, according to UNODC.

‘We oppose the production, trafficking and use of narcotics’

Most of the methamphetamine originates from laboratories hidden in the mountains of northern Shan State and other areas on Myanmar’s eastern borders, which have become the region’s epicentre of synthetic drug production and are part of the “Golden Triangle” – the lawless territory encompassing the shared borders of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos.

But before the explosion in methamphetamine production, the Golden Triangle was infamous for its opium crops and the heroin it produced while under the rule of the self-styled drug lord Khun Sa – the undisputed drug kingpin of the 1980s and 1990s regional drug trade.

Khun Sa is believed to have commanded a personal army of some 15,000 men and under his direction much of Shan State became the global centre of heroin production. He surrendered to the military government in Myanmar in 1996 and died in Yangon in 2007, under the protection of the same generals who had shielded him for years.

“In the early 1980s, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that 70 percent of the heroin consumed in the US came from his organization ,” Kelvin Rowley, a lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, wrote after Khun Sa’s death.

“The US government placed a $2 million bounty on [Khun Sa’s] head – an amount reportedly less than what he earned in a single month,” Rowley said.

Opium has now made a comeback in the Golden Triangle.

After the Taliban banned poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2022, Myanmar returned to being the world’s top producer of opium.

In 2023, according to UNODC estimates, Myanmar’s poppy fields stretched over more than 47,000 hectares (more than 116,000 acres), and by 2024, some 995 tonnes of raw opium was produced – an increase of 135 percent since the military takeover in 2021. The gross value of the opium and heroin trade in Myanmar last year was estimated to be between $589m and $1.57bn, according to UNODC.

The scale of drug production, the UN reports, is also tied to the civil war in Myanmar, which is now in its fourth year.

Myanmar’s economy has collapsed since the military coup in 2021, and with options narrowing, people have traditionally turned to poppy cultivation as a means to survive.

The UN notes that opium poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia has long been linked to poverty, lack of government services, economic challenges and insecurity.

“Households and villages in Myanmar that engage in poppy cultivation and the broader opium economy do so to supplement income or because they lack other legitimate opportunities,” the UN said.

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But now parts of Pekon, long a military stronghold and a key drug trafficking corridor, are under the control of the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) and other Karenni armed groups fighting the ruling military.

They say they want to change things.

“We oppose the production, trafficking, and use of narcotics,” said Maui, a deputy commander of the KNDF.

“When we capture Burmese soldiers, they’re full of meth,” Maui said.

“We ask where it comes from and they tell us, without hesitation, it’s distributed by their superiors to push them to the front lines,” he said.

“Once the war is over, we’ll go after the opium too. We want it to be used only for medical purposes,” he added.

As part of those antidrug efforts, Karenni police forces stop and search motorcycles and vehicles on roads in the areas of Shan State they now control.

“We are stopping cars and motorbikes we don’t recognise to search for drugs,” said Karenni police commander Win Ning Thun, standing at a checkpoint just outside a village in Pekon district.

“We’re looking for yaba pills,” said Win Ning Thun, using the local name for methamphetamine pills.

“Until recently, this area was under military and pro-junta militia control,” Win Ning Thun said.

“Meth was moving freely under their supervision. They took a percentage of the profits from every shipment passing through,” he said.

‘I was supposed to make a lot of money’

Deep in the forests surrounding Pekon, a small prison holds rows of detainees arrested by Karenni police.

“Everyone here has been arrested for drug trafficking. Some were carrying yaba pills to the Thai border. Others were internal couriers,” a Karenni police official told Al Jazeera.

“These are the pills we confiscated just this past month,” he said, holding up a plastic bag stuffed with small red yaba pills that are easy to conceal, sold cheaply, but represent a trade that is worth millions of dollars.

Among the detainees in the prison was Anton Lee, who wore glasses and a calm, unassuming look.

“They stopped me at a checkpoint with 10,000 pills,” Lee said.

“I was taking them to the Thai border. I was supposed to make a lot of money,” he said, offering no further details, only to say that the profit he hoped to earn would have fed his family for a year.

Now, he faces a long time in prison.

Not too far from the prison, the civil war grinds on in Myanmar as the military regime buys more advanced weaponry, and the rebel forces try to hold out and extend their advances.

The military’s air raids, drone strikes and artillery fire hammer schools, hospitals, homes and religious sites, turning entire villages into targets.

Yet, even under fire, here in southern Shan State, some appear to be trying to staunch the flow of drugs.

With limited resources, they tell of doing what they can in another battle inside a much larger war.

Mastering control of the ever rising and falling rattan chinlone ball instils patience, a veteran of Myanmar’s traditional sport says.

“Once you get into playing the game, you forget everything,” 74-year-old Win Tint says.

“You concentrate only on your touch, and you concentrate only on your style.”

Chinlone, Myanmar’s national game, traces its roots back centuries. Described as a fusion of sport and art, it is often accompanied by music and typically sees men and women playing in distinct ways.

Teams of men form a circle, passing the ball among themselves using stylised movements of their feet, knees and heads in a game of “keepy-uppy” with a scoring system that remains inscrutable to outsiders.

Women, meanwhile, play solo in a fashion reminiscent of circus acts – kicking the ball tens of thousands of times per session while walking tightropes, spinning umbrellas and balancing on chairs placed atop beer bottles.

Participation has declined in recent years with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the 2021 military coup and subsequent civil conflict.

Poverty is on the rise, and artisans face mounting challenges in sourcing materials to craft the balls.

Variants of the hands-free sport, colloquially known as caneball, are played widely across Southeast Asia.

In Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, participants use their feet and heads to send the ball over a net in the volleyball-style game “sepak takraw”.

In Laos, it is known as “kataw” while Filipinos play “sipa”, meaning kick.

In China, it is common to see people kicking weighted shuttlecocks in parks.

Myanmar’s version is believed to date back 1,500 years.

Evidence for its longevity is seen in a French archaeologist’s discovery of a replica silver chinlone ball at a pagoda built during the Pyu era, which stretched from 200 BC to 900 AD.

Originally, the sport was played as a casual pastime, a form of exercise and for royal amusement.

In 1953, however, the game was codified with formal rules and a scoring system, part of efforts to define Myanmar’s national culture after independence from Britain.

“No one else will preserve Myanmar’s traditional heritage unless the Myanmar people do it,” player Min Naing, 42, says.

Despite ongoing conflict, players continue to congregate beneath motorway flyovers, around street lamps dimmed by wartime blackouts and on purpose-made chinlone courts – often open-sided metal sheds with concrete floors.

“I worry about this sport disappearing,” master chinlone ball maker Pe Thein says while labouring in a sweltering workshop in Hinthada, 110km (68 miles) northwest of Yangon.

“That’s the reason we are passing it on through our handiwork.”

Seated cross-legged, men shave cane into strips, curve them with a hand crank and deftly weave them into melon-sized balls with pentagonal holes before boiling them in vats of water to enhance their durability.

“We check our chinlone’s quality as if we’re checking diamonds or gemstones,” the 64-year-old Pe Thein says.

“As we respect the chinlone, it respects us back.”

Each ball takes about two hours to produce and brings business-owner Maung Kaw $2.40.

But supplies of the premium rattan he seeks from Rakhine state in western Myanmar are becoming scarce.

Fierce fighting between military forces and opposition groups that now control nearly all of the state has made supplies precarious.

Farmers are too frightened to venture into the jungle battlegrounds to cut cane, Maung Kaw says, which jeopardises his livelihood.

Flies hovered over the blackened and swollen bodies of men and boys, lying side-by-side on a piece of tarpaulin, in blood-soaked combat fatigues, amid preparations for a rushed cremation in the Tamu district of Myanmar’s Sagaing region, bordering India.

Quickly arranged wooden logs formed the base of the mass pyre, with several worn-out rubber tyres burning alongside to sustain the fire, the orange and green wreaths just out of reach of the flames.

Among the 10 members of the Pa Ka Pha (PKP), part of the larger People’s Defence Forces (PDF), killed by the Indian Army on May 14, three were teenagers.

The PKP comes under the command of the National Unity Government (NUG), Myanmar’s government-in-exile, comprising lawmakers removed in the 2021 coup, including legislators from Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.

It mostly assists the PDF – a network of civilian militia groups against the military government – which serves, in effect, as the NUG’s army.

The Indian Army said that on May 14, a battalion of the country’s Assam Rifles (AR) paramilitary force patrolling a border post in the northeast Indian state of Manipur, killed 10 men armed with “war-like stores” who were “suspected to be involved in cross-border insurgent activities”. The battalion, the Indian Army said, was “acting on specific intelligence”.

The Indian soldiers were stationed at the border in Chandel, a district contiguous with Tamu on the Myanmar side of the frontier. Manipur has been torn by a civil war between ethnic groups for the past two years, and Indian authorities have often accused migrants from Myanmar of stoking those tensions.

However, disputing the Indian version of the May 14 events, the exiled NUG said its cadres were “not killed in an armed encounter within Indian territory”. Instead, it said in a statement, they were “captured, tortured and summarily executed by” Indian Army personnel.

For nearly five years since the coup, political analysts and conflict observers say that resistance groups operating in Myanmar, along the 1,600km-long (994 miles) border with India, have shared an understanding with Indian forces, under which both sides effectively minded their own business.

That has now changed with the killings in Tamu, sending shockwaves through the exiled NUG, dozens of rebel armed groups and thousands of refugees who fled the war in Myanmar to find shelter in northeastern Indian states. They now fear a spillover along the wider frontier.

“Fighters are in panic, but the refugees are more worried – they all feel unsafe now,” said Thida*, who works with the Tamu Pa Ah Pha, or the People’s Administration Team, and organised the rebels’ funeral on May 16. She requested to be identified by a pseudonym.

Meanwhile, New Delhi has moved over the past year to fence the international border with Myanmar, dividing transnational ethnic communities who have enjoyed open-border movement for generations, before India and Myanmar gained freedom from British rule in the late 1940s.

“We felt safe [with India in our neighbourhood],” said Thida. “But after this incident, we have become very worried, you know, that similar things may follow up from the Indian forces.”

“This never happened in four years [since the armed uprising against the coup], but now, it has happened,” she told Al Jazeera. “So, once there is a first time, there could be a second or a third time, too. That is the biggest worry.”

‘Proactive operation or retaliation?’

On May 12, the 10 cadres of the PKP arrived at their newly established camp in Tamu after their earlier position was exposed to the Myanmar military. A senior NUG official and two locals based in Tamu independently told Al Jazeera that they had alerted the Indian Army of their presence in advance.

“The AR personnel visited the new campsite [on May 12],” claimed Thida. “They were informed of our every step.”

What followed over the next four days could not be verified independently, with conflicting versions emerging from Indian officials and the NUG. There are also contradictions in the narratives put out by Indian officials.

On May 14, the Indian Army’s eastern command claimed that its troops acted on “intelligence”, but “were fired upon by suspected cadres”, and killed 10 cadres in a gunfight in the New Samtal area of the Chandel district.

Two days later, on May 16, a spokesperson for India’s Ministry of Defence said that “a patrol of Assam Rifles” was fired upon. In retaliation, they killed “10 individuals, wearing camouflage fatigues”, and recovered seven AK-47 rifles as well as a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Five days later, on May 21, the Defence Ministry identified the killed men as cadres of the PKP. The ministry spokesperson further noted that “a patrol out to sanitise the area, where fence construction is under way along the [border], came under intense automatic fire”, with the intent “to cause severe harm to construction workers or troops of Assam Rifles to deter the fencing work”.

Speaking with Al Jazeera, a retired Indian government official, who has advised New Delhi on its Myanmar policy for a decade, pointed out the dissonance in the Indian versions: Did Indian soldiers respond proactively to intelligence alerts, or were they reacting to an attack from the rebels from Myanmar?

“It is difficult to make sense of these killings. This is something that has happened against the run of play,” the retired official, who requested anonymity to speak, said. The contradictions, he said, suggested that “a mistake happened, perhaps in the fog of war”.

“It cannot be both a proactive operation and retaliation.”

Al Jazeera requested comments from the Indian Army on questions around the operation, first on May 26, and then again on May 30, but has yet to receive a response.

Thura, an officer with the PDF in Sagaing, the northwest Myanmar region where Tamu is too, said, “The [PKP cadres] are not combat trained, or even armed enough to imagine taking on a professional army”.

‘Taking advantage of our war’

When they were informed by the Indian Army of the deaths on May 16, local Tamu authorities rushed to the Indian side.

“Assam Rifles had already prepared a docket of documents,” said a Tamu official, who was coordinating the bodies’ handover, and requested anonymity. “We were forced to sign the false documents, or they threatened not to give the corpses of martyrs.”

Al Jazeera has reviewed three documents from the docket, which imply consent to the border fencing and underline that the PDF cadres were killed in a gunfight in Indian territory.

Thida, from the Tamu’s People’s Administration Team, and NUG officials, told Al Jazeera that they have repeatedly asked Indian officials to reconsider the border fencing.

“For the last month, we have been requesting the Indian Army to speak with our ministry [referring to the exiled NUG] and have a meeting. Until then, stop the border fencing process,” she said.

Bewildered by the killings, Thida said, “It is easy to take advantage while our country is in such a crisis. And, to be honest, we cannot do anything about it. We are the rebels in our own country — how can we pick fights with the large Indian Army?”

Above all, Thida said she was heartbroken. “The state of corpses was horrific. Insects were growing inside the body,” she recalled. “If nothing, Indian forces should have respect for our dead.”

Border fencing anxieties

Angshuman Choudhury, a researcher focused on Myanmar and northeast India, said that conflict observers “are befuddled by these killings in Tamu”.

“It is counterintuitive and should not have happened by any measure,” he said.

The main point of dispute, the border fencing, is an age-old issue, noted Choudhary. “It has always caused friction along the border. And very violent fiction in the sense of intense territorial misunderstandings from groups on either side,” he said.

When New Delhi first moved last year to end the free movement regime, which allows cross-border movement to inhabitants, Indigenous communities across India’s northeastern states of Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh were left stunned. Members of these communities live on both sides of the border with Myanmar – and have for centuries.

Political analysts and academics note that the border communities on either side reconciled with the idea of India and Myanmar because of the freedom to travel back and forth. Erecting physical infrastructure triggers a kind of anxiety in these transnational communities that demarcation on maps does not, argued Choudhary.

“By fencing, India is creating a completely new form of anxieties that did not even exist in the 1940s, the immediate post-colonial period,” Choudhary said. “It is going to create absolutely unnecessary forms of instability, ugliness, and widen the existing fault lines.”

Last year, the Indian home minister, Amit Shah, said that border fencing would ensure India’s “internal security” and “maintain the demographic structure” of the regions bordering Myanmar, in a move widely seen as a response to the conflict in Manipur.

Since May 2023, ongoing ethnic violence between the Meitei majority and the Kuki and Naga minority communities has killed more than 250 people and displaced thousands. The state administration has faced allegations of exacerbating the unrest to strengthen its support among the Meitei population, which the government has denied.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and the Manipur state government, also under the BJP, have blamed the crisis in Manipur in part on undocumented migrants from Myanmar, whom they accuse of deepening ethnic tensions.

Now, with the killings in Tamu, Choudhary said that Indian security forces had a new frontier of discontent, along a border where numerous armed groups opposed to Myanmar’s ruling military have operated — until now, in relative peace with Indian troops.

The deaths, he said, could change the rules of engagement between Indian forces and those groups. “Remember, other rebel groups [in Myanmar] are also watching this closely,” he said. “These issues can spiral quickly.”

Bokeo province, Laos – Khobby was living in Dubai last year when he received an intriguing message about a well-paying job working online in a far-flung corner of Southeast Asia.

The salary was good, he was told. He would be working on computers in an office.

The company would even foot the bill for his relocation to join the firm in Laos – a country of 7.6 million people nestled between China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.

With the company paying for his flights, Khobby decided to take the plunge.

But his landing in Laos was anything but smooth.

Khobby discovered that the promised dream job was rapidly becoming a nightmare when his Ghanaian passport was taken on arrival by his new employers.

With his passport confiscated and threats of physical harm ever present, he endured months working inside a compound which he could not leave.

The 21-year-old had become the latest victim of booming online cyber-scam operations in Southeast Asia – an industry that is believed to have enslaved tens of thousands of workers lured with the promise of decently paid jobs in online sales and the information technology industry.

“When I got there, I saw a lot of Africans in the office, with a lot of phones,” Khobby told Al Jazeera, recounting his arrival in Laos.

“Each person had 10 phones, 15 phones. That was when I realised this was a scamming job,” he said.

The operation Khobby found himself working for was in a remote area in northwest Laos, where a casino city has been carved out of a patch of jungle in the infamous “Golden Triangle” region – the lawless border zone between Myanmar, Laos and Thailand that has long been a centre for global drug production and trafficking.

He said he was forced to work long days and sleep in a dormitory with five other African workers at night during the months he spent at the scam centre in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone.

Khobby recounted the original message he received from an acquaintance encouraging him to take the job in Laos.

“My company is hiring new staff”, he said, adding that he was told the salary was $1,200 per month.

“He told me it was data entry.”

Casino city

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) where Khobby was lured to for work operates as an autonomous territory within Laos.

Leased from Laotian authorities by Chinese national Zhao Wei, whom the US government has designated the leader of a transnational criminal organisation, life in the GTSEZ is monitored by a myriad of security cameras and protected by its own private security force.

Clocks are set to Beijing time. Signage is predominantly in Chinese, and China’s yuan is the dominant and preferred currency.

Central to the GTSEZ city-state is Zhao Wei’s Kings Romans casino, which the United States Treasury also described as a hub for criminal activity such as money laundering, narcotics and wildlife trafficking.

During a recent visit to the zone by Al Jazeera, Rolls Royce limousines ferried gamblers to some of the city’s casinos while workers toiled on the construction of an elaborate and expansive Venice-style waterway just a stone’s throw from the Mekong river.

While luxury construction projects – including the recently completed Bokeo International Airport – speak to the vast amounts of money flowing through this mini casino city, it is inside the grey, nondescript tower blocks dotted around the economic zone where the lucrative online scam trade occurs.

Within these tower blocks, thousands of trafficked workers from all over the world – just like Khobby – are reported to spend up to 17 hours a day working online to dupe unsuspecting “clients” into parting with their money.

The online swindles are as varied as investing money in fake business portfolios to paying false tax bills that appear very real and from trading phoney cryptocurrency to being caught in online romance traps.

Anti-trafficking experts say most of the workers are deceived into leaving their home countries – such are nearby China, Thailand and Indonesia or as far away as Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Ethiopia – with the promise of decent salaries.

Online ‘butchering’

Khobby told how his “data entry” job was, in fact, a scam known in the cybercrime underworld as “pig butchering”.

This is where victims are identified, cold-called or messaged directly by phone in a bid to establish a relationship. Trust is built up over time to the point where an initial investment is made by the intended victim. This can be, at first, a small amount of the victim’s money or emotions in the case of fake online relationships.

There are small rewards on the investments, Khobby explained, telling how those in the industry refer to their victims as pigs who are being “fattened” by trust built up with the scammers.

That fattening continues until a substantial monetary investment is made in whatever scam the victim has become part of. Then they are swiftly “butchered”, which is when the scammers get away with the ill-gotten gains taken from their victims.

Once the butchering is done, all communications are cut with the victims and the scammers disappear without leaving a digital trace.

According to experts, cyber-scamming inside the GTSEZ boomed during the 2019 and 2020 COVID lockdowns when restrictions on travel meant international visitors could not access the Kings Romans casino.

In the years since, the cyber-scam industry has burgeoned, physically transcended borders to become one of the dominant profit-making illicit activities in the region, not only in the GTSEZ in Laos but also in neighbouring Cambodia and in conflict-ridden Myanmar.

Though not as elaborate as the GTSEZ, purpose-built cyber-scam “compounds” have proliferated in Myanmar’s border areas with Thailand.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cyber-scamming in Southeast Asia generates tens of billions annually, while the United States Institute of Peace equates the threat to that of the destructive fentanyl trade.

“Cyber-scam operations have significantly benefitted from developments in the fintech industry, including cryptocurrencies, with apps being directly developed for use at [cyber-scam] compounds to launder money,” said Kristina Amerhauser, of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

“Victims and perpetrators are spread across different countries, money is laundered offshore, operations are global,” Amerhauser told Al Jazeera, explaining that the sophisticated technology used in cyber-scamming, along with its international reach, has made it extremely difficult to combat.

Complicit victims?

About 260 trafficked scam-centre workers were recently rescued in a cross-border operation between Thailand and Myanmar. Yet, even in rare instances such as this when trafficked workers are freed, they still face complications due to their visa status and their own potential complicity in criminal activity.

Khobby – who is now back in Dubai – told Al Jazeera that while he was coerced into working in the GTSEZ, he did actually receive the promised $1,200 monthly salary, and he had even signed a six-month “contract” with the Chinese bosses who ran the operation.

Richard Horsey, International Crisis Group’s senior adviser on Myanmar, said Khobby’s experience reflected a changing trend in recruitment by the criminal organisations running the scam centres.

“Some of the more sophisticated gangs are getting out of the human trafficking game and starting to trick workers to come,” Horsey said.

“People don’t like to answer an advert for criminal scamming, and it’s hard to advertise that. But once they’re there, it’s like – actually, we will pay you. We may have taken your passport, but there is a route to quite a lucrative opportunity here and we will give you a small part of that,” he said.

The issue of salaries paid to coerced and enslaved workers complicates efforts to repatriate trafficking victims, who may be considered complicit criminals due to their status as “paid” workers in the scam centres, said Eric Heintz, from the US-based anti-trafficking organisation International Justice Mission (IJM).

“We know of individuals being paid for the first few months they were inside, but then it tapers off to the point where they are making little – if any – money,” Heintz said, describing how victims become “trapped in this cycle of abuse unable to leave the compound”.

“This specific aspect was a challenge early on with the victim identity process – when an official would ask if an individual previously in the scam compound was paid, the victim would answer that initially he or she was. That was enough for some officials to not identify them as victims,” Heintz said.

Some workers have also been sold between criminal organisations and moved across borders to other scam centres, he said.

“We have heard of people being moved from a compound in one country to one in another – for example from Myawaddy to the GTSEZ or Cambodia and vice versa,” he said.

Khobby said many of the workers in his “office” had already had experience with scamming in other compounds and in other countries.

“Most of them had experience. They knew the job already,” he said.

“This job is going on in a lot of places – Thailand, Laos, Myanmar. They were OK because they got paid. They had experience and they knew what they were doing,” he added.

‘What are we here for? Money!’

High-school graduate Jojo said she was working as a maid in Kampala, Uganda, when she received a message on the Telegram messaging app about an opportunity in Asia that involved being sponsored to do computer studies as part of a job in IT.

“I was so excited,” Jojo recounted, “I told my mum about the offer.”

Jojo told how she was sent an airline ticket, and described how multiple people met her along the way as she journeyed from Kampala to Laos. Eventually Jojo arrived in the same scam operation as Khobby.

She described an atmosphere similar to a fast-paced sales centre, with Chinese bosses shouting encouragement when a victim had been ‘butchered’ and their money stolen, telling how she witnessed people scammed for as much as $200,000.

“They would shout a lot, in Chinese – ‘What are we here for? Money!’”

On top of adrenaline, the scam operation also ran on fear, Jojo said.

Workers were beaten if they did not meet targets for swindling money. Mostly locked inside the building where she worked and lived; Jojo said she was only able to leave the scam operation once in the four months she was in the GTSEZ, and that was to attend a local hospital after falling ill.

Fear of the Chinese bosses who ran the operation not only permeated their workstations but in the dormitory where they slept.

“They told us ‘Whatever happens in the room, we are listening’,” she said, also telling how her co-workers were beaten when they failed to meet targets.

“They stopped them from working. They stopped them from coming to get food. They were not getting results. They were not bringing in the money they wanted. So they saw them as useless,” she said.

“They were torturing them every day.”

Khobby and Jojo said they were moved to act in case it was their turn next.

When they organised a strike to demand better treatment, their bosses brought in Laotian police and several of the strikers – including Jojo and Khobby – were taken to a police station where they were told they were sacked.

They were also told they would not be paid what was owed in wages and their overseers refused to give their passports back.

Khobby said he was left stranded without a passport and the police refused to help.

“This is not about only the Chinese people,” Khobby said. “Even in Vientiane, they have immigration offices who are involved. They are the ones giving the visas. When I got to Laos, it was the immigration officer who was waiting for me. I didn’t even fill out any form,” he said.

With help from the Ghanaian embassy, Khobby and Jojo were eventually able to retrieve their passports, and with assistance from family and friends, they returned home.

The IJM’s Heintz, said that target countries for scammer recruitment – such as those in Africa – need better awareness of the dangers of trafficking.

“There needs to be better awareness at the source country level of the dangers associated with these jobs,” he said.

Reflecting on what led him to work up the courage to lead a strike in the scam centre, Khobby considered his childhood back in Ghana.

“I was a boy who was raised in a police station. My grandpa was a police commander. So in that aspect, I’m very bold, I have that courage. I like giving things a try and I like taking risks,” he said.

Jojo told Al Jazeera how she continues to chat online with friends who are still trapped in scam centres in Laos, and who have told her that new recruits arrive each day in the GTSEZ.

Her friends want to get out of the scam business and the economic zone in Laos. But it is not so easy to leave, Jojo said.

“They don’t have their passports,” she said.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime says ‘explosive growth’ in synthetic drug trade led to record seizures of methamphetamine in East and Southeast Asia in 2024.

Drug production and trafficking has surged in the infamous “Golden Triangle“, where the borders of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand meet, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has warned in a new report on the scale of the regional trade in synthetic drugs.

The UNODC said a record 236 tonnes of methamphetamine were seized last year in the East and Southeast Asia regions, marking a 24 percent increase in the amount of the narcotic seized compared with the previous year.

While Thailand became the first country in the region to seize more than 100 tonnes of methamphetamine in a single year last year – interdicting a total of 130 tonnes – trafficking of the drug from Myanmar’s lawless Shan State is rapidly expanding in Laos and Cambodia, the UNODC said.

“The 236 tons represent only the amount seized; much more methamphetamine is actually reaching the market,” the UNODC’s acting regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Benedikt Hofmann, said in a statement.

“While these seizures reflect, in part, successful law enforcement efforts, we are clearly seeing unprecedented levels of methamphetamine production and trafficking from the Golden Triangle, in particular Shan State,” Hofmann said.

Transnational drug gangs operating in East and Southeast Asia are also showing “remarkable agility” in countering attempts by regional law enforcement to crack down on the booming trade in synthetic drugs.

Myanmar’s grinding civil war, which erupted in mid-2021, has also provided favourable conditions for an expansion of the drug trade.

“Since the military takeover in Myanmar in February 2021, flows of drugs from the country have surged across not only East and Southeast Asia, but also increasingly into South Asia, in particular Northeast India,” the report states.

The UNODC’s Inshik Sim, the lead analyst for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said countries neighbouring Myanmar are becoming key trafficking routes for drugs produced in the Golden Triangle.

“The trafficking route connecting Cambodia with Myanmar, primarily through Laos PDR, has been rapidly expanding,” Sim said, using the acronym that is part of Laos’s official name, the People’s Democratic Republic.

“Another increasingly significant corridor involves maritime trafficking routes linking Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, with Sabah in Malaysia serving as a key transit hub,” he said.

Evolving, cell-based transnational organized crime groups based in East and #SoutheastAsia are increasingly adopting technologies across the entire drug supply chain while converging with other organized crime activities.

Read more in our latest report: https://t.co/oL416cuZJ3 pic.twitter.com/pqUfX5FmnF

— UNODC Southeast Asia-Pacific (@UNODC_SEAP) May 28, 2025

The UNODC report also notes that while most countries in the region have reported an overall increase in the use of methamphetamine and ketamine – a powerful sedative – the number of drug users in the older age group has grown in some nations.

“Some countries in the region, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, have reported consecutive increases in the number of older drug users, while the number of younger users has declined,” the UNODC report states, adding that the age trend needed to be studied further.

The UNODC’s Hofmann said the decline in the number of younger drug users admitted for treatment may be due to targeted drug use prevention campaigns.

“It will be key for the region to increase investment in both prevention and supply reduction strategies,” he added.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Myanmar in March 2025, devastating communities across the country. Al Jazeera was the only international broadcaster with a team on the ground to witness the unfolding crisis. What emerged was a story of survival against overwhelming odds.

From the capital Naypyidaw to the spiritual heart of Mandalay, our cameras captured the desperate search for survivors and the scale of destruction. At the epicentre, entire neighbourhoods lay in ruins as hundreds of thousands of people found themselves without shelter, clean water or food. Emergency services struggled to cope with the response required.

The disaster struck a nation already fractured by civil conflict, where a military government appeared ill-equipped to handle the crisis. Over seven days, Al Jazeera correspondent Tony Cheng documented not just the immediate aftermath, but how this natural catastrophe exposed deeper challenges facing the people of Myanmar during their darkest hour.

In Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee camp, three Rohingya artists are defying cultural erasure. Through painting, music, and photography, they preserve the memory of a people long persecuted in Myanmar. This Talk to Al Jazeera special looks beyond the headlines of displacement and genocide investigations into the creative resistance of a stateless community. As Myanmar continues to deny them recognition, these artists are fighting back with colour, sound, and story, refusing to let their heritage disappear.

UNHCR says two shipwrecks on May 9 and 10 could be the ‘deadliest tragedy at sea’ involving Rohingya so far this year.

At least 427 Rohingya, Myanmar’s Muslim minority, may have perished at sea in two shipwrecks on May 9 and 10, the United Nations said, in what would be another deadly incident for the persecuted group.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR) said in a statement on Friday that – if confirmed – the two incidents would be the “deadliest tragedy at sea” involving Rohingya refugees so far this year.

“The UN refugee agency is gravely concerned about reports of two boat tragedies off the coast of Myanmar earlier this month,” UNHCR said in the statement, adding that it was still working to confirm the exact circumstances surrounding the shipwrecks.

According to the agency, preliminary information indicated that a vessel carrying 267 people sank on May 9, with only 66 people surviving, and a second ship with 247 Rohingya on board capsized on May 10, with just 21 survivors.

The Rohingya on board were either leaving Bangladesh’s huge Cox’s Bazar refugee camps or fleeing Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, the statement said.

Persecuted in Myanmar for decades, thousands of Rohingya risk their lives every year to flee repression and civil war in their country, often going to sea on board makeshift boats.

In a post on X, UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi said news of the double tragedy was “a reminder of the desperate situation” of the Rohingya “and of the hardship faced by refugees in Bangladesh as humanitarian aid dwindles”.

In 2017, more than a million Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine State following a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military.

At least 180,000 of those who fled are now facing deportation back to Myanmar while those who stayed behind in Rakhine have endured dire conditions confined to refugee camps.

In 2021, the military launched a coup in Myanmar, ousting the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Since then, Rakhine has been the scene of fierce fighting between the military and the Arakan Army, an ethnic minority rebel group, for control of the state amid a widening civil war in the country.

“The dire humanitarian situation, exacerbated by funding cuts, is having a devastating impact on the lives of Rohingya, with more and more resorting to dangerous journeys to seek safety, protection and a dignified life for themselves and their families,” said Hai Kyung Jun, who leads UNHCR’s regional bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

In 2024, some 657 Rohingya died in the region’s waters, according to UNHCR.

Humanitarian organisations have been hit hard by funding cuts from major donors, led by the United States administration of President Donald Trump and other Western countries, as they prioritise defence spending prompted by growing fears of Russia and China.

UNHCR is seeking financial support to stabilise the lives of Rohingya refugees in host countries, including Bangladesh, and those displaced inside Myanmar.

Its request for $383m for support in 2025 is currently only 30 percent funded, the agency said.

On a typical day, Mai Rupa travels through his native Shan State, in eastern Myanmar, documenting the impact of war.

A video journalist with the online news outlet Shwe Phee Myay, he travels to remote towns and villages, collecting footage and conducting interviews on stories ranging from battle updates to the situation for local civilians living in a war zone.

His job is fraught with risks. Roads are strewn with landmines and there are times when he has taken cover from aerial bombing and artillery shelling.

“I have witnessed countless people being injured and civilians dying in front of me,” Mai Rupa said.

“These heartbreaking experiences deeply affected me,” he told Al Jazeera, “at times, leading to serious emotional distress.”

Mai Rupa is one of a small number of brave, independent journalists still reporting on the ground in Myanmar, where a 2021 military coup shattered the country’s fragile transition to democracy and obliterated media freedoms.

Like his colleagues at Shwe Phee Myay – a name which refers to Shan State’s rich history of tea cultivation – Mai Rupa prefers to go by a pen name due to the risks of publicly identifying as a reporter with one of the last remaining independent media outlets still operating inside the country.

Most journalists fled Myanmar in the aftermath of the military’s takeover and the expanding civil war. Some continue their coverage by making cross-border trips from work bases in neighbouring Thailand and India.

But staff at Shwe Phee Myay – a Burmese-language outlet, with roots in Shan State’s ethnic Ta’ang community – continue reporting from on the ground, covering a region of Myanmar where several ethnic armed groups have for decades fought against the military and at times clashed with each other.

Fighting to keep the public informed

After Myanmar’s military launched a coup in February 2021, Shwe Phee Myay’s journalists faced new risks.

In March that year, two reporters with the outlet narrowly escaped arrest while covering pro-democracy protests. When soldiers and police raided their office in the Shan State capital of Lashio two months later, the entire team had already gone into hiding.

That September, the military arrested the organisation’s video reporter, Lway M Phuong, for alleged incitement and dissemination of “false news”. She served nearly two years in prison. The rest of the 10-person Shwe Phee Myay team scattered following her arrest, which came amid the Myanmar military’s wider crackdown on the media.

Spread out across northern Shan State in the east of the country, the news team initially struggled to continue their work. They chose to avoid urban areas where they might encounter the military. Every day was a struggle to continue reporting.

“We couldn’t travel on main roads, only back roads,” recounted Hlar Nyiem, an assistant editor with Shwe Phee Myay.

“Sometimes, we lost four or five work days in a week,” she said.

Despite the dangers, Shwe Phee Myay’s reporters continued with their clandestine work to keep the public informed.

When a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit central Myanmar on March 28, killing more than 3,800 people, Shwe Phee Myay’s journalists were among the few able to document the aftermath from inside the country.

The military blocked most international media outlets from accessing earthquake-affected areas, citing difficulties with travel and accommodation, and the few local reporters still working secretly in the country took great risks to get information to the outside world.

“These journalists continue to reveal truths and make people’s voices heard that the military regime is desperate to silence,” said Thu Thu Aung, a public policy scholar at the University of Oxford who has conducted research on Myanmar’s post-coup media landscape.

On top of the civil war and threats posed by Myanmar’s military regime, Myanmar’s journalists have encountered a new threat.

In January, the administration of US President Donald Trump and his billionaire confidante Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

USAID had allocated more than $268m towards supporting independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries around the world – from Ukraine to Myanmar, according to journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

In February, The Guardian reported on the freezing of USAID funds, creating an “existential crisis” for exiled Myanmar journalists operating from the town of Mae Sot, on the country’s border with Thailand.

The situation worsened further in mid-March, when the White House declared plans for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to reduce operations to the bare minimum. USAGM oversees – among others – the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which were both leading providers of news on Myanmar.

Last week, RFA announced it was laying off 90 percent of its staff and ceasing to produce news in the Tibetan, Burmese, Uighur and Lao languages. VOA has faced a similar situation.

Tin Tin Nyo, managing director of Burma News International, a network of 16 local, independent media organisations based inside and outside Myanmar, said the loss of the Burmese-language services provided by VOA and RFA created a “troubling information vacuum”.

Myanmar’s independent media sector also relied heavily on international assistance, which had already been dwindling, Tin Tin Nyo said.

Many local Myanmar news outlets were already “struggling to continue producing reliable information”, as a result of the USAID funding cuts brought in by Trump and executed by Musk’s DOGE, she said.

Some had laid off staff, reduced their programming or suspended operations.

“The downsizing of independent media has decreased the capacity to monitor [false] narratives, provide early warnings, and counter propaganda, ultimately weakening the pro-democracy movement,” Tin Tin Nyo said.

“When independent media fail to produce news, policymakers around the world will be unaware of the actual situation in Myanmar,” she added.

‘Constant fear of arrest or even death’

Currently, 35 journalists remain imprisoned in Myanmar, making it the world’s third-worst jailer of journalists after China and Israel, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The country is ranked 169th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.

“Journalists on the ground must work under the constant fear of arrest or even death,” Tin Tin Nyo said.

“The military junta treats the media and journalists as criminals, specifically targeting them to silence access to information.”

Despite the dangers, Shwe Phee Myay continues to publish news on events inside Myanmar.

With a million followers on Facebook – the digital platform where most people in Myanmar get their news – Shwe Phee Myay’s coverage has become even more critical since the military coup in 2021 and the widening civil war.

Established in 2019 in Lashio, Shwe Phee Myay was one of dozens of independent media outlets which emerged in Myanmar during a decade-long political opening, which began in 2011 with the country’s emergence from a half-century of relative international isolation under authoritarian military rule.

Pre-publication censorship ended in 2012 amid a wider set of policy reforms as the military agreed to allow greater political freedom. Journalists who had lived and worked in exile for media outlets such as the Democratic Voice of Burma, The Irrawaddy and Mizzima News began cautiously returning home.

However, the country’s nascent press freedoms came under strain during the term of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy government, which came to power in 2016 as a result of the military’s political reforms.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s government jailed journalists and blocked independent media access to politically sensitive areas including Rakhine State, where the military committed a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya community and for which it now faces international charges of genocide.

But the situation for independent journalists dramatically worsened following the 2021 coup. As the military violently cracked down on peaceful protests against the generals seizing power, it restricted the internet, revoked media licences and arrested dozens of journalists. That violence triggered an armed uprising across Myanmar.

‘If we stop, who will continue addressing these issues?’

Shwe Phee Myay briefly considered relocating to Thailand as the situation deteriorated after the coup, but those running the news site decided to remain in the country.

“Our will was to stay on our own land,” said Mai Naw Dang, who until recently served as the editor of Burmese-to-English translations.

“Our perspective was that to gather the news and collect footage, we needed to be here.”

Their work then took on new intensity in October 2023, when an alliance of ethnic armed organisations launched a surprise attack on military outposts in Shan State near the border with China.

The offensive marked a major escalation in the Myanmar conflict; the military, which lost significant territory as a result, retaliated with air strikes, cluster munitions and shelling. Within two months, more than 500,000 people had been displaced due to the fighting.

With few outside journalists able to access northern Shan State, Shwe Phee Myay was uniquely positioned to cover the crisis.

Then in January this year, Shwe Phee Myay also received notice that USAID funds approved in November were no longer coming and it has since reduced field reporting, cancelled training and scaled back video news production.

“We’re taking risks to report on how people are impacted by the war, yet our efforts seem unrecognised,” editor-in-chief Mai Rukaw said.

“Even though we have a strong human resource base on the ground, we’re facing significant challenges in securing funding to continue our work.”

During staff meetings, Mai Rukaw has raised the possibility of shutting down Shwe Phee Myay with his colleagues.

Their response, he said, was to keep going even if the money dries up.

“We always ask ourselves: if we stop, who will continue addressing these issues?” he said.

“That question keeps us moving forward.”