Mandalay, May 2026: The Man Who Counted Junta Airstrikes Until They Came for Him

On the morning of March 12, 2026, Ko Thant was sitting at a folding table in a third-floor apartment in Mandalay's Chan Aye Tharzan Township, transcribing his notes from the previous night's airstrike. The apartment had three rooms and no air conditioning. The windows faced a narrow street where motorcycles idled in the heat. He had been living there for fourteen months, moving every six to eight weeks, always within the same neighborhood, always to buildings owned by people who did not ask questions. The notes described an attack on Pale Township in Sagaing Region: eight structures destroyed, four confirmed dead, munitions consistent with Chinese-made LS-6 precision-guided bombs. He was entering the data into a spreadsheet when he heard boots on the stairs.

Ko Thant, forty-one, had been documenting Myanmar's civil war since the February 2021 coup. His database contained 1,847 separate incidents of airstrikes and artillery bombardment against civilian areas by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar's military junta. Each entry included coordinates, munitions type, casualty estimates, and photographs when available. The spreadsheet ran to 126,000 rows. He sent updates every two weeks to three international human rights organizations, none of which he had ever met in person. His real name is not Ko Thant. He chose the pseudonym after Thant Myint-U, the historian, because he wanted people to remember that Myanmar once had a different future.

When the boots reached the second-floor landing, Ko Thant closed the laptop, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and placed it inside a rice cooker in the kitchen. The rice cooker was unplugged. He had three phones: one for Signal, one for calls to his mother, one for coordination with sources in Sagaing and Magway. He turned all three off and placed them in a terra-cotta planter behind the building's water tank. Then he returned to the table and waited. The door opened at 9:17 a.m. There were six soldiers. The one in front carried a photograph printed on A4 paper. The photograph showed Ko Thant leaving a tea shop in Aung Myay Tharzan Township on February 8. He had been living in a different apartment then. He recognized the shirt he was wearing.

How the Database Grew

Ko Thant began his work in April 2021, two months after Senior General Min Aung Hlaing's coup against the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was trained as a civil engineer and had spent sixteen years designing irrigation systems for rural townships. The coup erased that career. By March 2021, the military had killed more than seven hundred protesters in Yangon, Mandalay, and Monywa. Ko Thant joined the Civil Disobedience Movement, the nationwide strike that paralyzed the bureaucracy and crippled the junta's ability to govern. He stopped going to the Ministry of Agriculture. He started going to funerals.

What he noticed, at the funerals and in the camps where protesters fled after crackdowns, was the absence of documentation. People knew that soldiers had fired into crowds, that neighborhoods had been raided, that bodies had been taken to military hospitals and not returned. But no one was counting in a systematic way. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners was tracking arrests and extrajudicial killings in urban areas. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project was mapping clashes between the Tatmadaw and the People's Defense Forces. But airstrikes—the systematic bombing of villages in Sagaing, Magway, Chin, and Kayah States—were happening in areas journalists could not reach. The junta had shut down mobile internet in conflict zones. The victims were often ethnic minorities whose deaths did not reach Yangon.

Ko Thant decided that if no one else was counting, he would. He started with open-source data: posts on Facebook, photographs on Telegram channels run by local defense groups, reports from exile media like Myanmar Now and The Irrawaddy. He cross-referenced claims, eliminated duplicates, verified locations using satellite imagery from Sentinel-2 and commercial providers. When he could not verify an incident, he marked it as unconfirmed and moved on. By June 2021, he had documented forty-three airstrikes. By December, the number was 311. By May 2026, it was 1,847.

The Network

Ko Thant built his network slowly. He found sources among PDF fighters, village administrators in exile, medics working in mobile clinics along the Thai border. He never met any of them. All communication was encrypted, routed through VPNs, conducted in Burmese and occasionally in Karenni or Chin when the source preferred. He used pseudonyms. His sources used pseudonyms. The only people who knew his real name were his mother, who lived in Yangon and believed he was working construction in Thailand, and one contact at a European human rights organization who managed the encrypted server where Ko Thant uploaded his data every two weeks.

The sources sent photographs: craters in schoolyards, fragments of munitions, bodies laid out in monastery courtyards. Ko Thant analyzed the fragments. He taught himself to identify Russian-made OFAB-250 bombs, Chinese LS-6 glide bombs, and the Israeli-designed SPICE guidance kits that Myanmar purchased before sanctions tightened. He learned to distinguish between attacks by Yak-130 light attack aircraft and Mi-35 helicopters. The munitions told a story about supply chains: Russia continued to provide spare parts despite claiming neutrality; China's state-owned defense companies shipped precision-guided systems through intermediaries in Singapore and Hong Kong; Israel denied any ongoing relationship but Israeli components appeared in wreckage photographed as recently as January 2026.

Ko Thant understood this pattern because he had mapped it. Airstrikes concentrated in areas where the PDF and ethnic armed organizations—the Karenni National Progressive Party, the Chin National Front, the All Burma Students' Democratic Front—had seized territory from the Tatmadaw. Sagaing Region accounted for 37 percent of all documented airstrikes, followed by Magway Region at 19 percent and Kayah State at 14 percent. These were not random. These were the areas where the junta had lost control of roads, lost control of towns, lost the ability to resupply garrisons without helicopters. The bombing was not a prelude to retaking territory. It was an admission that retaking territory was no longer possible.

What the Data Revealed

By 2024, Ko Thant had shared his database with three organizations: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Fortify Rights, a Southeast Asia-focused NGO based in Geneva. All three had used his data in reports submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which had suspended Myanmar's participation in summits but declined to impose sanctions. The reports documented patterns that met the legal definition of war crimes: indiscriminate attacks on civilians, targeting of medical facilities, destruction of food supplies in areas facing famine.

None of the reports changed anything on the ground. The UN Security Council could not act because China and Russia held vetoes. The ICC had no jurisdiction because Myanmar was not a signatory to the Rome Statute. ASEAN's doctrine of non-interference meant that Thailand and Vietnam, the countries with the most leverage, refused to pressure the junta. The only consequence was that Ko Thant's work became known to people who wanted it to stop.

The first attempt to identify Ko Thant came in August 2024, when a source in Sagaing was arrested after a raid on a PDF camp. The source's phone contained Signal messages. Military intelligence traced the messages to a number registered in Mandalay. The number belonged to a phone Ko Thant had discarded three months earlier, but it narrowed the search area. Ko Thant moved from Aung Myay Tharzan to Chan Aye Tharzan and stopped leaving the apartment except on Tuesdays, when he bought supplies at a market six blocks away.

The second attempt came in February 2026, when a European diplomat mentioned Ko Thant's database in a closed-door briefing to ASEAN ambassadors in Bangkok. The briefing was supposed to be confidential. Within a week, Myanmar's state media published an article accusing "foreign agents" of fabricating evidence to justify sanctions. The article did not name Ko Thant, but it described his methodology with enough precision that anyone familiar with the work would recognize it. Ko Thant stopped using the tea shop. He stopped using the market on Tuesdays. He left the apartment only twice: once to move the laptop to a new location, once to meet a courier who delivered cash from the European contact. The courier was followed. The photograph on A4 paper was taken during that meeting.

The Arrest

The soldiers who entered Ko Thant's apartment on March 12 were from the 77th Light Infantry Division, which handles internal security in Mandalay. They did not ask questions. They searched the apartment for forty minutes. They found the laptop in the rice cooker. They did not find the phones. They handcuffed Ko Thant and took him to the division headquarters on the eastern edge of the city, a compound that had once been a technical college and was now ringed with concertina wire and blast walls. He was placed in a cell with eleven other men. None of them spoke. The cell had no windows and one fluorescent light that stayed on twenty-four hours a day.

Ko Thant was interrogated three times over the next two weeks. The interrogators wanted names: the sources who sent photographs, the human rights workers who received the database, the diplomats who used the data in briefings. Ko Thant gave them nothing. The interrogators had the laptop, but the laptop was encrypted with a 256-bit key and a dead-man's switch that would wipe the drive if the correct password was not entered every seventy-two hours. Ko Thant had not entered the password since March 12. On March 15, the drive wiped itself. On March 17, the interrogators broke two of Ko Thant's ribs and told him he would be charged under Section 505(a) of the Penal Code, which criminalizes speech that causes "fear or alarm" or undermines the military. The penalty is up to three years in prison. The average sentence, for those who survive detention, is seven.

What Remains

Ko Thant's database no longer exists on the laptop seized in Mandalay, but it exists in other places. The European contact maintains a backup on a server in Estonia. Amnesty International has a copy. Human Rights Watch has a copy. Fortify Rights has a copy. The data continues to be updated, not by Ko Thant, but by the network he built. Sources in Sagaing and Magway still send photographs to encrypted numbers. The photographs are still verified, cataloged, and entered into spreadsheets. The work continues because the airstrikes continue.

On April 22, the Tatmadaw bombed a displaced persons camp in Hpakant Township, Kachin State, killing thirty-one people and wounding seventy-four. The camp housed civilians fleeing fighting between the military and the Kachin Independence Army. The attack was documented by three sources, verified using satellite imagery, and added to the database as incident number 1,848. Ko Thant, in a cell in Mandalay, does not know this. He does not know that the work survived him. He does not know if he will survive the work.

His mother, in Yangon, was notified of his arrest on March 20, eight days after it happened. She was told he was being held on national security charges and that she could not visit him. She was not told where he was being held. She was not told when he would face trial. She was told to stop asking questions. She has not stopped asking questions.

The War That Will Not End

Myanmar's civil war is now in its sixth year. The Tatmadaw controls less than 40 percent of the country's territory, according to estimates by the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, a group of former UN officials monitoring the conflict. The junta has lost entire townships in Sagaing, Chin, Kayah, and northern Shan States. It has lost the ability to move supplies by road in much of the country. It has lost the support of civil servants, teachers, and doctors who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement and never returned. What it has not lost is the willingness to bomb.

The airstrikes serve no military purpose. The PDF and ethnic armed organizations do not hold fixed positions that can be destroyed from the air. They operate as mobile guerrilla units, ambushing convoys, overrunning isolated garrisons, and melting back into villages where they are indistinguishable from civilians. Bombing the villages does not weaken the PDF. It radicalizes the survivors. Every destroyed school, every burned monastery, every family fleeing into the forest creates new recruits. The junta understands this. The bombing continues anyway, because it is the only thing the junta can still do.

The international community has responded with statements, resolutions, and symbolic gestures. The United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada have imposed sanctions on junta officials and military-owned companies. The sanctions have not stopped the bombing. China continues to supply weapons and spare parts through shell companies and intermediaries. Russia continues to provide training and diplomatic cover at the UN. Thailand continues to host junta officials at unofficial meetings in border towns. ASEAN continues to call for dialogue while doing nothing to compel it.

Ko Thant's trial has not been scheduled. Under Myanmar's judicial system, detainees can be held for up to two years before formal charges are filed. Many are held longer. Some are never charged at all. Some are released after years in detention, broken and silent. Some are not released. In March 2025, the junta announced that it had executed four political prisoners, the first judicial executions in Myanmar since 1988. The men had been convicted of killing a military officer during a protest. They were hanged at Insein Prison in Yangon. Their families were not notified until after the executions were carried out.

Ko Thant knows this. He knew it when he started counting. He knew it when the boots reached the second-floor landing. He knew it when he placed the phones behind the water tank and returned to the table to wait. He counted anyway. The database contains 1,847 incidents because someone decided that 1,847 incidents should not be forgotten. The work continues because forgetting is not an option. The airstrikes continue because the junta has nothing left but the capacity to destroy. The question is not whether the bombing will stop. The question is what will be left when it does.