Accounts from Myanmar army soldiers who have surrendered or defected over the past three months reveal that the military is suffering from plunging morale and overstretched logistics amid a rebel offensive that has prompted mass surrenders.

These accounts, provided by more than 30 soldiers, suggest that the rebels’ recent battlefield successes go beyond mere territorial gains and are undermining the cohesion of the forces defending Myanmar’s military junta.

On the battlefield, where pro-democracy fighters and ethnic insurgents are waging a multifront campaign, calls by army units for reinforcements and resupply of ammunition have frequently gone unanswered, former commanders said. One soldier said rations for his battalion ran so low that troops disguised themselves as civilians to buy food from villagers. Another said combat support personnel were deployed to the battlefront without any training. Some soldiers said they were forced into the military and never wanted to fight in the first place.

These accounts of a military under pressure come from interviews with 13 soldiers and similar testimony from 19 others contained in charging documents reviewed by The Washington Post. The records, which have not been previously reported, were compiled by state police aligned with the rebels after a major November battle in southeastern Myanmar.

The information supplied by the captured soldiers and defectors offers only a partial picture of a war being waged across much of Myanmar, and many details could not be independently confirmed. The soldiers’ accounts of mass surrenders echo the claims of rebel groups, which say thousands of troops, including entire battalions, have surrendered or defected since the rebel offensive began in October. Photographs and videos posted online appear to depict large numbers of captured troops being escorted under guard out of besieged command centers and handing over weapons to rebels.

Myanmar’s military seized power in 2021 after ousting the democratically elected government. When protests erupted across the country, the military responded with force, and thousands of its opponents turned to armed resistance, in some cases making common cause with ethnic rebel groups. The military has sought to crush opposition with methods so brutal and indiscriminate that U.N. investigators say they are likely war crimes.

But last year, the rebels pushed the military into its weakest position in decades by capturing towns on the edges of the country and driving the junta’s forces toward the middle, analysts say.

Investigators at Myanmar Witness, an independent nongovernmental group that verifies developments in the Myanmar war, said they used open-source information to geolocate footage of five mass surrenders and weapon seizures since October. The investigators said that their efforts have only just begun and that their findings represent “the tip of the iceberg of the military’s losses.”

Researchers at the Institute for Strategy and Policy-Myanmar, a Myanmar-based think tank, are also working to verify surrenders, and Executive Director Min Zin said it is already apparent that the scale is unprecedented in the military’s history. Myanmar analysts from four other independent research institutions agreed.

“It speaks volumes about the military’s capacities that they had to accept this kind of situation,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group.

Military cohesion

Since the rebels launched their offensive, their territorial gains have surprised even their most ardent supporters. But the bigger threat to the junta, analysts say, is the impact the offensive has had on the military’s internal cohesion.

Myo Myint Aung, who runs one of several organizations that help defecting soldiers flee Myanmar, said that since October, the number of soldiers contacting his group has tripled from about 30 a month to more than 100. “Their main reason is this: They’re afraid to die,” he said. “They know the military is starting to lose.”

A spokesman for the junta did not respond to requests for comment. The military’s commander in chief, Min Aung Hlaing, has not addressed the reports of mass surrenders, but said at a recent meeting with commanders that soldiers “have to follow military discipline and avoid acts harmful to individuals and the organization,” according to the Global New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper.

The military, which has ruled Myanmar with brief interludes since 1948, has enforced loyalty in its ranks even during periods of intense instability. It’s by no means certain, analysts say, that the army’s current struggles portend imminent disintegration or defeat. “What we’re seeing is not an avalanche,” Morgan Michaels, a Singapore-based conflict analyst for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said of the surrenders. “But it’s the beginning of something we have not seen before in Myanmar.”

Accounts of those who recently surrendered or defected shed light on the lengths to which the military is going to maintain control. Commanders have been cutting soldiers off from news about the wider battlefield by severing their communication with the outside world, according to interviews and documents. The military has also sought to indoctrinate its forces, soldiers said, alternately portraying rebels as disorganized forces that are easy to defeat and ruthless fighters who kill soldiers without exception.

The soldiers’ accounts used in this article were collected three ways. Army defectors, who have been able to leave the country and now live along the Myanmar-Thailand border, were interviewed by Post journalists over video calls. Soldiers who are being held as prisoners of war were interviewed in person in rebel compounds by a Post journalist, beyond the earshot of their captors. These prisoners seemed to be healthy and well-treated, and they appeared to willingly agree when approached by the journalist and asked to be interviewed. Neither the interviews with defectors nor those with prisoners were arranged by rebel groups.

Nineteen of the accounts are from police charging documents. These police, aligned with the rebels, may not be entirely neutral sources. The reports were dated and signed by both the prisoner and the police officer who conducted the questioning, providing a degree of accountability. While these prisoners were not interviewed by Post journalists, some of the information they provided was corroborated in interviews with other soldiers and witnesses, as well as by photos and videos from the front lines.

The soldiers, ages 19 to 51 and mostly privates and a few officers, appeared to have several motivations for providing their accounts. The defectors said they were interested in revealing the difficult situation facing the military in hopes that this could bring an end to the conflict. Soldiers who had been captured appeared to want to justify their surrender, saying their commanders had set them up for failure through poor training, planning and provision of supplies.

The battle for Loikaw

The October offensive started in Shan state in the north with coordinated attacks by an alliance of rebel groups.

In November, a separate rebel group in the southern state of Kayah began advancing on the military’s stronghold in the state capital, Loikaw. The army unit commander, Phyo Myint Hlaing, 36, said that after trying in vain to call for backup, he retreated into a ditch, where he surrendered along with seven other soldiers.

At Loikaw University in the city center, where more than a hundred army troops were barricaded, the rebels called for surrender. “Nobody is going to come and rescue you. We won’t hurt you. Just come out,” shouted the deputy commander of the rebel group just outside the gates, according to videos verified by The Post. Dozens of soldiers exited, he recalled.

Rebels killed more than 300 soldiers and captured 63 in the battle for Loikaw, said Khun Bedu, chairman of the Karenni Nationalities Defense Force, speaking in an interview.

Echoing the accounts of other soldiers, Kyaw Lwin, an army private who surrendered outside Loikaw, told police that conditions in the military had been deteriorating. “I tried to run away,” said Kyaw Lwin, 21. “But unfortunately, I was caught and they tortured me a lot.”

Rations and reinforcements

Since rebels moved on Loikaw, hundreds of other military outposts, including several battalion headquarters, have fallen to rebel control, according to independent research groups.

In early December, a unit of 22 army soldiers was airlifted to the southern region of Bago but quickly found itself surrounded, unit commander Kyaw Lat Kan, 39, recounted in an interview. “From the start, the plan didn’t work,” he said.

The soldiers had been deposited more than a mile from the base they were assigned to defend, Kyaw Lat Kan said. Unfamiliar with the terrain, they were ambushed. Some of the troops, deployed to the location as a part of an earlier round of reinforcements, were combat support personnel who had never fought before, he said. After a quarter of his group had been killed and with ammunition dwindling, Kyaw Lat Kan surrendered.

“I didn’t have a choice,” he said, wringing his hands as he was interviewed inside rebel-controlled territory, where he’s being held with dozens of other prisoners of war.

Analysts say, based on satellite imagery of troop movements, that the military has mobilized more troops in recent months than at any other time since the 2021 coup. But the army has struggled to supply them, according to soldiers. The junta is strapped for cash, in part, because of mounting international sanctions, including U.S. restrictions on the state-owned oil and gas company.

One soldier said troops deployed in the southeast were given “two cups of rice, no beans, no meat” per day. Another, Htan Kyun Htan, 31, said he was told to do sentry duty without a gun because none were available. When he defected in November, he said, it was like “leaving a slave’s life.”

Isolated from the outside

Army commanders have sought to keep their troops in line, despite falling morale, by limiting their outside contact. Captured soldiers say commanders have blocked personnel from communicating with anyone outside their units, leaving them ignorant of the military’s losses across the country.

Rebels acknowledged this has made it more difficult to win the soldiers’ surrender.

“Join with the people or die — that’s our message,” said Marwi, the rebels’ deputy commander in Loikaw. “But it’s difficult to get the message to them.”

As he spoke on a recent day, several hundred army soldiers were still holding their position nearby at a battalion command center. Blocks away, Karenni Nationalities Defense Force rebels were patrolling streets littered with shell casings and artillery fragments, and the bloated bodies of dead soldiers floated in a canal bordering Loikaw University. It remained unclear whether the rebels’ appeal would succeed.

Soldiers who had previously surrendered or defected said that when they weren’t at the front, they were instructed to remain inside their compounds, with few exceptions. One said he had been stationed at an embattled outpost in Shan state for three years before he was granted permission to take a week off last year. Another soldier in his unit said he hadn’t returned to his home state or seen his family since he had been impressed into the army five years earlier.

A defector named Sai Aung said in an interview that commanders of his unit clamped down every time someone disappeared, tightening curfews and confiscating phones. When he escaped in December from a base near Bago and gained access to the internet, he was surprised to learn the extent of the military’s losses across the country.

“We had none of this information inside,” said Sai Aung. As troops, he added, “all we got were orders.”

Yan reported from Bangkok, and Nachemson from Loikaw.