ARSA After the Myanmar Coup: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Since the Myanmar armed forces, or Tatmadaw, seized power in a coup d’état on February 1, the country has been beset by mass civil disobedience and the emergence of People’s Defense Forces fighting for Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG). In Rakhine State, in the country’s west, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) continues to engage in sporadic skirmishes with security forces. Recent clashes involving ARSA are, however, more indicative of the group’s current weakness than its strength. ARSA first came into the spotlight in October 2016 after launching a “human wave”-style assault involving several hundred attackers armed with knives, slingshots, and firearms on three Myanmar border police posts in northern Rakhine. Despite a brutal military crackdown, ARSA was involved in 15 further smaller-scale skirmishes with security forces, including two successful IED attacks on Tatmadaw convoys, before it launched another major attack on August 25, 2017. Having taken several months to reconsolidate and ramp up its training and IED production, ARSA launched what would proved to be its last major offensive. The attack saw hundreds of locally-recruited attackers armed with rudimentary farming tools and IEDs swarm some 30 Myanmar border guard posts.

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