Two Years of Arakan Liberation War: What Have Been Achieved and What Not?

Opinion

Global Arakan Network November 13, 2025

The first shots cracked at dawn on November 13, 2023, ripping through the mist over Rathedaung Township. Arakan Army fighters stormed the junta’s Done-Paik and Chain-Kharli camps, shattering the uneasy truce that had held since November 2020. What began as a pinpoint raid metastasized into a sweeping offensive.

Tactical outposts fell in rapid succession; battalion headquarters crumbled; the military operations command was overrun; and, in a symbolic gut-punch, the regional military headquarters in Ann—one of Myanmar’s fourteen strategic citadels—was wrested from Naypyidaw’s grasp. Two years later, on November 13, 2025, the scoreboard is stark: fifteen of Arakan’s eighteen townships fly the AA banner. Kyaukphyu, Sittwe, and the eastern parts of the Arakan Roma remain contested, but the tide is unmistakable. Militarily, the AA has eviscerated the junta’s grip; politically, it has vaulted from provincial insurgency to national kingmaker, its voice now decisive in Myanmar’s fractured power calculus.

Multi-Ethnic Football Match Ceremony To Mark Birthday of the ULA Chairman in Maungdaw(photocrd)

Dominance, however, is a double-edged blade. The junta’s response has been total asphyxiation. Trade arteries are severed; humanitarian convoys are turned back at gunpoint. Six hundred thousand internally displaced persons—entire communities uprooted—languish in makeshift camps, their survival measured in dwindling rice sacks and untreated wounds.

Bangladesh’s border clampdown since mid-2025 has only tightened the noose, choking northern Arakan’s markets and leaving Muslim villages, already threadbare, to barter hope for salt. Overhead, the junta’s Mi-35s and Su-30s prowl like iron vultures, raining indiscriminate ordnance on ULA-held towns. Each sortie is a war crime in real time—schools flattened, clinics vaporized, civilians shredded by shrapnel. The generals in Naypyidaw call it “counter-insurgency”; the people on the ground call it genocide by altitude.

Yet amid the rubble, something irreducible has taken root. For the first time in two centuries—since British gunboats first steamed up the Kaladan—Arakan’s soil answers to Arakan’s will. Farmers plant without requisition slips; elders convene without informants; children chase kites past checkpoints that no longer exist.

The AA’s administrative skeleton—rudimentary courts, fledgling tax systems, nascent health posts—creaks under the weight of war, but it functions. Markets in liberated townships hum with local scrip and barter, a fragile but authentic economy. The psychological shift is seismic: fear has been replaced by ownership. A Rakhine grandmother in Buthidaung no longer flinches at the sound of boots; a Mro youth in Kyauktaw speaks of “our government” without irony. This is not utopia—it is sovereignty in its raw, blood-streaked infancy.

Chairman Twan Mrat Naing Met Muslim Leaders in Maungdaw

The ledger of the unachieved is sobering. The junta’s blockade remains a medieval siege by modern means; IDP camps teeter on the brink of famine; air raids continue to write obituaries in the sky. Bangladesh’s closure, ostensibly politically-driven for refugee repatriation, has become collective punishment. The ULA’s political vision—national equality, ethnic reconciliation, resource justice—come to realize more but experience with some challenges.

Still, the arithmetic of dignity is unequivocal. Two hundred years of external dominion—British, Japanese, Burmese—have been compressed into a single, defiant parenthesis. The people of Arakan have seized the pen of their own history. Future generations will inherit not subjugation’s residue but the unfiltered air of a fatherland reclaimed. The road ahead is pocked with craters—humanitarian, diplomatic, moral—but the destination is no longer in doubt. Arakan has remembered how to stand. The rest is detail.