Three Brotherhood Alliance or the Alliance That Brings Myanmar Junta to Its Knees

Aung Naing Lin, Opinion

Global Arakan Network October 29, 2025

History rarely announces its turning points with fanfare. It prefers the quiet click of a magazine sliding into place, the low hum of encrypted radios at dawn, the sudden silence when a regime’s convoy vanishes from a mountain pass. Such was the sound of October 27, 2023—Operation 1027—the moment the Three Brotherhood Alliance transformed from a footnote in ceasefire negotiations into the fulcrum upon which Myanmar’s future now pivots.

Formed in June 2019 under the long shadow of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement’s hollow promises, the Alliance—comprising the Arakan Army, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army—did not emerge from rage alone. It was forged in the colder furnace of strategic patience. While others signed papers in hotel ballrooms, these three forces drilled in monsoon-drenched jungles, mapped supply lines through opium trails, and cultivated a unity that transcended old blood feuds. They understood a truth the junta never grasped: exclusion breeds not compliance, but convergence.

The 2021 coup was the detonator. As tear gas choked Yangon’s streets and resistance units spread outed in Sagaing’s rice fields, a new arithmetic of resistance took shape. Ethnic minorities, long dismissed as peripheral insurgents, suddenly found themselves at the center of a national uprising.

The Bamar heartland, once the regime’s unassailable base, bled recruits into guerrilla columns. Two currents—one demanding federal autonomy, the other raw democracy—did not merge by accident. They collided, fused, and produced a hybrid force: democratic self-determination. A concept sharp enough to cut through decades of centralized tyranny.

Residents celebrate after TNLA and PDF troops took complete control of Mogoke town in northern Mandalay Region on Wednesday. / Mai A Hein

Operation 1027 was not merely a military campaign; it was a manifesto in motion. In 10 months, the Alliance seized Lashio, overran jade mines that funded Min Aung Hlaing’s war chest, and severed the Mandalay-Muse highway—the junta’s arterial link to foreign powers. But the real rupture was psychological. Soldiers who once believed themselves invincible watched their officers flee in civilian clothes. Villagers who had paid “tea money” for decades now hosted liberation councils. The myth of Naypyidaw’s omnipotence cracked like cheap plaster.

This is where the Alliance’s genius reveals itself: it fights on three fronts simultaneously. The first is territorial—every captured battalion headquarters is a brick removed from the regime’s foundation. The second is political—by coordinating with diverse resistance cells in the country, it weaves a tapestry of governance that out-administers the collapsing state. The third, and most devastating, is symbolic.

When AA fighters raise their flag over a town once garrisoned by Light Infantry Division, they do not merely claim land. They reclaim narrative. They prove that cohesion—once mocked as ethnic fractiousness—can kneecap a dictatorship.

MNDAA troops pose in front of the headquarters of the Northeastern Regional Military Command in Lashio on August 3 (MNDAA)

The junta’s response has been predictably brutal: airstrikes on civilian convoys, scorched-earth retreats, internet blackouts to stifle coordination. Yet each atrocity accelerates the Alliance’s momentum. Burned villages become recruitment centers. Starved garrisons defect in platoons. The regime’s violence, once a deterrent, now functions as the Alliance’s most effective propagandist.

Other armed groups watch with a mixture of envy and calculation. The Kachin Independence Army weighs joint operations in Putao. Even restorationist factions within the old NLD orbit quietly court Alliance liaisons. The message is unmistakable: fragmentation is suicide; federation is survival. The Brotherhood model—decentralized command, shared intelligence, rotating front-line leadership—offers a blueprint for any group still clinging to bilateral ceasefires or solo glory.

AA Captured Ann Headquarter of Myanmar Junta (photocrd)

Make no mistake: the war is far from won. The junta retains air superiority, foreign patrons, and a willingness to reduce cities to rubble. But momentum is no longer theoretical. It is measured in kilometers of liberated highway, in the growing silence of regime loudspeakers, in the daily erosion of a military that once equated control with existence.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance has done more than bring the junta to its knees. It has forced Myanmar to confront a future it spent seventy years evading: a country where power flows upward from the periphery, where self-determination is not a concession but a precondition, where the center must earn its place at the table. The impossible, it turns out, was only waiting for the right constellation of courage and timing.

And the constellation is still rising.