Two weeks inside a resistance army's mountain stronghold as it wages war on Myanmar's military dictatorship.
Bullets whizzed overhead as Dr Amos Dawt Za Hmung stepped out of his clandestine health clinic in Thantlang — a town in the hills of north-western Myanmar — into a street gripped by chaos.
Moments earlier, he had finished performing surgery alongside his wife, Rebecca, a nurse, when the sound of powerful weapons struck him numb with terror.
The Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, had burst forth from their hilltop barracks overlooking the town and was now shooting, looting and setting buildings ablaze.
Now Dr Amos was standing in the streets, weighing up an impossible choice.
Rebecca was heavily pregnant and their infant son was at home on the other side of town.
Their only means of reuniting the family was a perilous dash through the gunfire and flames.
"In my mind, I have to go to home — I have to see my son," Dr Amos recalls.
"But, on the other hand, my wife is still pregnant and would have to ride on the back of my bicycle."
The young parents mounted the bike and set off into the heart of the battle to find their son.
However, as they rode through the centre of town, their path was blocked by two Tatmadaw soldiers, guns drawn.
"I just thought: 'Wow, we're dead'," Dr Amos recalls.
Whether it was a rogue bullet or a shot aimed with intent by an unseen protector, Dr Amos still doesn't know.
But, suddenly, one of the soldiers fell down dead, struck by a bullet to the head.
The other soldier, turning to see his comrade fall, wheeled around and looked directly at the fleeing couple.
"Don't come any closer," he warned them.
"Just hide, get out of here," the soldier yelled. Moments later, he too was felled by a bullet, dead.
"He could easily have shot us," Dr Amos says. "I don't know, maybe he saw that Rebecca was pregnant and let us go?"
Their story of escape from Thantlang is just one of thousands of tales since the attacks began in September 2021.
Today, nearly all of the town's estimated 12,000 residents have fled.
The town's destruction has inspired a youth-led rebellion against the military.
To locals, it was known as the "golden town", a peaceful place of churches and colourful homes that hugged the thin ribbon of a road winding through the green undulations.
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In September 2021, Thantlang's peace was shattered.
In retaliation for an ambush by local resistance fighters, Tatmadaw soldiers unleashed a barrage of artillery targeting homes and buildings in the centre of town.
The onslaught in September 2021 set at least 18 homes and a government building ablaze, according to local media.
Terrorised residents fled the chaos, abandoning their homes and leaving Thantlang virtually deserted.
But the destruction didn't stop.
As fighting escalated in October, more than 160 buildings were burned down in the empty town centre.
Satellite images from March this year show entire sections of the town have been completely wiped out.
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An ABC analysis of satellite imagery from December found 500 damaged buildings in Thantlang, many of which had been completely destroyed.
The Chin Human Rights Organisation (CHRO) believes the real total could be more than double that. They say many homes have been targeted as part of a campaign of deliberate arson waged by Tatmadaw troops.
Before fleeing Thantlang, Dr Amos was already an "enemy of the state". Months earlier, while he was living in Myamnar's former capital, Yangon, with his wife and infant son, the military junta decreed that all doctors and nurses would have to work for the regime, or face arrest.
It awoke a mutinous streak in the young doctor. He joined the outlawed Civil Disobedience Movement instead, known in Myanmar simply as the CDM, a nationwide strike aimed at crippling the military government by tanking the economy.
"I didn't want to work under the military government," he says.
"I want to stop all the functions of government control."
Now he's been driven even further from Yangon and more firmly into the arms of the anti-junta resistance that inhabits the hills along Myanmar's north-western border with India.
Dr Amos runs Tikir Hospital, consisting of three squat concrete buildings huddled at the top of a mountain.
Today it's shrouded in mist.
It's the only hospital caring for the people from the more-than 50 villages scattered across this remote and rugged corner of Myanmar.
In recent months, this area has seen some of the heaviest fighting yet in Myanmar's 18-month civil war.
ABC's Foreign Correspondent spent two weeks inside the growing resistance movement, with civilians such as Dr Amos aiding the war effort and the — mostly — young soldiers waging guerilla war against the military junta.
When the local rebel militia asked Dr Amos to establish a hospital here, there wasn't much to work with — "just the building", he says.
Along with his wife Rebecca and a small team of nurses, he has since established two hospital wards: one for local villagers and another for resistance fighters.
There's little inside to comfort the broken and the bleeding from the battlefield, beyond a surgeon's practised hands.
With transport routes in Myanmar mostly cut off, Dr Amos has been relying on medical supplies smuggled along the treacherous roads from the Indian border. "The hardest bit has been getting medicines and operating equipment," he says.
In July last year, the Tatmadaw began blocking international humanitarian aid from entering Chin State, creating dire shortages.
Supplies might be running low but there's been no lack of patients. On the operating table, a young soldier who caught a burst of shrapnel on the frontline lets out an anguished groan, as nurses in blue surgical gowns and flip-flops clean his lacerated flesh.
There's little inside to comfort the broken and the bleeding from the battlefield, beyond a surgeon's practised hands.
Another soldier is recovering in the ward from a similar injury, his once youthful face now scarred and pockmarked after a homemade bomb detonated at close range.
He was the lucky one: A friend standing next to him didn't survive the blast. And yet he's itching to return to the frontline to join his comrades fighting to wrest Thantlang from the Tatmadaw's grip. He has no home, except in the company of the soldiers he fights alongside.
Since the violence broke out, more than one million people have been internally displaced in Myanmar, according to UN figures.
Many have been forced to seek refuge in border areas, where food, shelter and medicine were already scarce.
Not far from Tikir hospital, 150 households who escaped the carnage in Thantlang have settled in the village of Salen.
Makeshift homes of rough timber and plastic sheeting have sprung up from the red earth, bracing for the coming wet season.
Soon they will float above rivers of mud that will flow through here when the rains arrive.
Near Salen village, I meet Emily Van Siang Zi, a high school student whose home was destroyed by fire in another attack on Thantlang in February. She's now one of Myanmar's million "IDPs" (internally displaced persons).
She lays the blame for her family's predicament at the feet of the Tatmadaw, saying the soldiers burned down her home, along with a hundred more that day.
"I was so afraid of them," she says. "They were shooting their guns at night. Every day, every night. I was so scared, so scared."
Her life is now on pause. A talented student, she hasn't seen her school friends in months.
"I miss them so much," she says. "I am alone."
It was Myanmar's younger generation who grew up nursing the flickering flame of democracy only to see it snuffed out in a military coup 18 months ago.
The country's decade-long experiment with democracy was ended with Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw, re-establishing military rule and jailing civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Determined not to see the dark decades of military rule return, millions of young Burmese took to the streets in protest, clashing with junta troops, who retaliated with lethal force to quash the uprising.
As images of protesters being killed on the streets began to circulate, their rage flared.
The world condemned the killings from afar, but with no promise of outside intervention, the young took up arms, joining local resistance groups to wage war against the military regime.
Cung Hlei Thwang, a 28-year-old Chin fighter, remembers how his mother begged him not to join the revolution, fearing he would be killed, and she would be left alone.
"My father had already passed away," Cung says. "I apologised to my mother, 'Please understand that I must fight because we are not safe, I am not safe, and you are not safe'."
He quit his job with an agricultural NGO and became a recruiter for the Chinland Defence Force in Thantlang, an anti-junta militia the locals call the CDF.
Armed with little more than single-shot rifles and homemade explosives — "tumee" in Burmese — the CDF established hidden jungle camps where new recruits could learn how to make bombs and fire a weapon.
They were students, farmers, journalists, "anything but soldiers", says Cung.
What many knew of warfare they learned playing video games.
Now, 18 months on from the coup, Cung has become the commander-in-chief, leading the Thantlang CDF battalion into real combat: with real bullets, real fear, real consequences.
His ragtag army is poorly equipped, but they say their intimate knowledge of the landscape is an asset.
"This is our land, this is our place," he says. "They can't defeat us, the only thing they can do is burn our homes, our churches. We hunt them like wolves."
On a hazy afternoon, Cung takes me to a CDF base on a bare hilltop overlooking Thantlang that is strung across the ridge line to the east.
A few white buildings jut out of vast, blackened voids, like jagged teeth in a broken smile.
"We called it the 'golden town'," he says, looking across the valley. "We would play in the river; it is such a beautiful place."
Today, Thantlang doesn't look so golden.
Whisps of white smoke rise from an unseen blaze shielded from view beyond the line of the road.
Cung tells me his CDF men killed two or three Tatmadaw soldiers this morning and the junta soldiers are burning houses in the town in retaliation.
"If we kill one soldier, they burn five or 10 buildings with the soldiers' bodies inside. This is their tactic."
I ask why they would burn their own fallen soldiers.
"Across Chinland, they do this," he says with a shrug, "perhaps to hide the true number of casualties."
It's a mysterious enemy the CDF battalion is preparing to face.
Cung's troops are gathering for an assault on the town — young men, their young faces glued to mobile phones like kids swapping selfies in a shopping mall: They mostly swap images of the frontline, the little moments of glory and horror.
“If we kill one soldier, they burn five or 10 buildings with the soldiers’ bodies inside. This is their tactic.”
War distorts many peacetime pursuits. A former journalist who used to fly his drone to snap photos for the local newspaper now uses it to hover over Tatmadaw positions up and down the valley.
Today there's a rumour of enemy soldiers in the Van Thio area, but the drone flights have failed to locate them.
No-one knows where they might be lurking.
Cung feels the weight of responsibility that comes with leading these young men into danger.
Before setting off, he gathers the troops to pray. The Chin people are predominantly Christian, converted by Western missionaries who began coming to the region in the early 1900s.
Cung hopes this group prayer session won't be their last.
"Listen to your leader … follow their orders and you will be safe," he tells them. "Team work is very important, so we can defeat the Tatmadaw."
Few places feel safe in this region of Myanmar: fewer still seem quite as dangerous as the road running south from Thantlang deeper into Tatmadaw territory.
It cuts a twisted path down river valleys and up over high peaks, with each blind bend threatening to reveal some hidden danger just out of sight.
In places, it narrows between a towering green wall above and a sheer void below, barely a scrape in some great upheaval of the Earth.
It's a route frequented by Tatmadaw convoys sending supplies and reinforcements to the frontline but, lately, they have been taught to fear this road too.
We're travelling to Camp Victoria, the jungle headquarters of the Chin National Army (CNA).
One of many ethnic armies in Myanmar's border regions, the CNA was established long before the 2021 coup to protect ethnic Chins against Tatmadaw persecution.
It has supreme command of most resistance operations across Chin State, including Cung and his CDF battalion stationed at Thantlang.
Its goal is the destruction of the Tatmadaw.
Before we can find them, they find us. We're stopped by a CNA convoy and asked to get into their truck: They tell us they have something they would like us to see.
Riding next to me in the truck, with a heavy weapon slung around his chest, is a young CNA soldier who once waited tables in Malaysia before joining the war.
Resistance fighters have been planting landmines along this road, he explains, to disable Tatmadaw convoys and trap them in the open.
Once the trucks are stalled, they become easy prey for the CNA soldiers lying in wait, who rain down gunfire from the hills above.
We pass a group of CNA recruits digging trenches in preparation for the next assault.
One such ambush was executed only weeks before our arrival, leaving a number of Tatmadaw soldiers dead, he says.
We arrive at the place the CNA soldiers want us to see, a village where 16 homes were recently burned down by junta soldiers.
They say these homes were razed in a brutal act of retaliation for their ambush on the Tatmadaw convoy.
Almost nothing remains, no hint nor clue to the shape of the buildings, nor the lives that inhabited this space until recently.
The villagers whose homes were spared have little choice but to remain living here under the shadow of terror cast by the Tatmadaw's vengeance.
A young mother, a baby slung at her side, shows us the view of blackened earth now filling her open window, in place of her neighbour's home.
Standing among the ashes, I ask a CNA soldier if people here are afraid.
"Of course," he says. "They are burning, murdering, killing people — killing people."
I ask what would happen if a soldier like him was captured.
"They will kill me, they will cut my head off, they will make incisions into my neck," he says.
As the war has dragged on, the Tatmadaw are accused of resorting to increasingly brutal tactics to bring the nation to heel.
In June, gruesome footage of a massacre in neighbouring Sagaing State was found on a soldierʻs lost phone.
The video, taken by the phone owner and first published by Radio Free Asia, shows graphic images of 27 male villagers killed in the village of Mon Taing.
After the day's brutality, the soldier and two others can be seen chatting and laughing about how many people they killed, and the gruesome methods they used.
International and local human rights groups are accusing the Tatmadaw of perpetrating war crimes across the country.
"It's deliberately targeted at the civilian population. It's designed to destroy livelihoods and lives that support the resistance movement," says Salai Za Uk Ling, of the Chin Human Rights Organisation.
"If these are not war crimes, I don't know what is.
"The methods that they use to instil fear in the population, be it the killing of a child, sexual violence against women, getting rid of bodies, burning, destroying evidence: They knowingly commit war crimes, and these are very well documented."
Deep in the mountains is Camp Victoria, the CNA's sprawling military complex set on a low hill at the base of a river valley.
The number of people living here has swelled over the past 18 months, so much so that the weekly church service has been moved from the chapel to the Chin Revolutionary Hall.
While 90 per cent of ethnic Chins are Christians, they themselves are a religious minority in a country where 90 per cent — including most Tatmadaw soldiers — practise Buddhism.
"If we die, we die together. If we live, we live together, is what we tell ourselves."
Some arrive in their Sunday best, others in military clobber. Smart shirts and machine guns and little girls with pink ribbons on their dresses.
Among the congregation is Dr Sui Khar, the Joint General Secretary of the Chin National Front (the CNA's political wing), and the ranking officer in Camp Victoria.
For 30 years he has been fighting for the rights of Chin State, and to push Myanmar along the path towards a federal democracy.
Despite repeated attempts by coup leader Min Aung Hlaing to hold peace talks with the ethnic armed groups, Dr Sui Khar is clear now is not the time to negotiate.
He says the youth are willing to keep fighting for the restoration of Myanmar's democracy.
"Under this military dictatorship … the youth have already convinced themselves that their future is nothing," he says.
"And they don't like to suffer, the younger generation, so that's why this is the once-and-for-all war, to eliminate this military dictatorship."
The young recruits here firmly believe they can win this war.
International law student Emily, from Yangon, once dreamed of studying abroad. Now she fights in the hope that such privileges will be available to the next generation, even if her chance has passed.
"My parents tried to stop me from coming, but I ran out with my friends," she says.
"'If we die, we die together. If we live, we live together,' is what we tell ourselves."
It's not just exuberant young revolutionaries who sense the tide is turning against the Tatmadaw.
The top brass here in Camp Victoria say the junta is beset by a war on all fronts and is increasingly being forced to play defence as the resistance becomes better organised.
The execution of four democracy activists in late July has only heightened resentment towards the regime, undermining support among the Buddhist Bamar ethnic majority, the military junta's most important support base.
Meanwhile, the National Unity Government (NUG), formed in exile after the coup, is positioning itself as the rightful government-in-waiting, garnering international recognition and building support among Myanmar's diverse ethnic groups, including the Chin.
"When we look at this NUG, we can see their commitment to eliminate this military dictatorship," says Dr Sui Khar.
"Their target is very clear … they want to hit the capital, Naypyidaw, and restore democracy. We think that working together with them will achieve our demands and goals."
The NUG's reach is extending further into the country.
Today, in Camp Victoria, the NUG's Ministry of Defence is opening a regional command post to ensure this remote region, which has been engaged in some of the heaviest fighting, gets the resources it needs.
"We have the people but we need guns, we need money," admits NUG spokesperson Daw Thant Wai Kyaw from Kalay township.
Many here feel the world has forgotten their war. Everyone here says what's needed is an international response.
"With that we can achieve our aim of creating a federal democracy that our citizens want."
Watch Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8pm on ABC TV, iview, YouTube or Facebook.
Credits
- Story and photography: Matt Davis
- Mapping graphics: Mark Doman, Tom Brettell and Alex Palmer
- Digital production: Matt Henry and Caitlyn Davey
