Myanmar’s ruling military junta has begun initial steps to draft women for active military service, residents said, showing the military’s desperation to replenish its ranks amid a series of battlefield defeats and desertions in the country’s four-year civil war.
Last year, the junta enforced a 2010 military conscription law saying men aged 18-35 and single women 18-27 would be eligible for military service.
So far, it has conscripted only men — sometimes by force — but since mid-January, authorities have begun compiling lists of eligible women in the Yangon region, residents in several townships said, suggesting official conscription would begin in the future.
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