BANGKOK – In a significant shift in Myanmar’s four-year-long civil conflict, the country’s military-led junta has announced it has reclaimed control of two strategically critical border towns, one abutting India and another near Thailand, in what marks the latest gains for government forces after they regained the upper hand nationwide earlier this year.
State-run Myanma Alinn newspaper published the announcement Thursday, confirming that Tonzang, a town in northwestern Chin State roughly 15 miles east of India’s border, fell back into army hands on Wednesday following a 10-day offensive. The publication released accompanying imagery showing junta troops posing in front of Tonzang’s main administrative buildings after the operation concluded.
The Tonzang announcement came just one day after the state outlet confirmed the recapture of Mawtaung, a key trade gateway on Myanmar’s border with Thailand located 390 miles southeast of Yangon, the country’s most populous city. That offensive took two weeks of sustained combat to conclude, according to the junta’s official account.
The territorial gains are the latest successes for the junta, which has reversed earlier resistance advances and seized the momentum in nationwide fighting since the middle of 2025. Analysts attribute this shift in fortunes to two key factors: China-brokered ceasefire agreements that split opposition blocs, and a controversial new conscription law that has dramatically expanded the junta’s available troop numbers.
The announcement also comes roughly one month after junta leader Min Aung Hlaing extended a public invitation to the country’s disparate armed resistance groups to enter into a new round of peace negotiations, a proposal that has not yet drawn a formal unified response from opposition forces.
Both Chin State and Tanintharyi Region, where Mawtaung is located, have been hotbeds of anti-junta violence since the military ousted the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi in a 2021 coup. After peaceful mass protests against the coup were violently crushed with lethal force, opponents of military rule took up arms, spawning a widespread civil war that has left large swathes of the country under the de facto control of resistance and ethnic militia groups.
Tonzang had been held by an alliance of Chin ethnic militias and local anti-junta resistance forces since May 2024, while Mawtaung was controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU), one of the oldest and largest ethnic armed opposition groups in the country, and its local allied resistance factions.
In its official report on the Mawtaung offensive, the state newspaper stated that junta forces conducted more than 207 separate armed engagements to retake the town, recovered the bodies of 24 KNU fighters and seized caches of opposition ammunition. The report also acknowledged that a number of junta security force members were also killed in the fighting, though no exact casualty count for government troops was released.
As of Thursday, the KNU and other local resistance groups have not issued any immediate response to the junta’s claims, nor have they formally challenged the announcement of the recaptures. Stringent media restrictions imposed by the junta across most of Myanmar make independent on-the-ground verification of the territorial claims impossible for outside journalists and observers.