Who Sustains Myanmar’s Murderous Air Force?

by Nyein Chan Aye

Smoke hung over what had been a busy riverside market in Kyauktaw in western Myanmar. Human remains lay among smoldering wreckage and cratered roads as families searched for their dead. The youngest child listed among the confirmed victims was four, according to a casualty list released by the Arakan Army (AA) that controls most of its home state of Rakhine.

As a journalist, I have become all too accustomed to studying photographs of Myanmar’s dead. And yet the pictures from Kyauktaw were difficult to look at.

By Tuesday, at least 50 people had been reported killed and 58 wounded after a Myanmar military aircraft bombed India Market and the nearby Kissapanadi Bridge.

I also monitored reactions on TikTok, Telegram and other platforms. Some pro-military accounts celebrated the attack and invoked the February 2024 fighting on the Kaladan River, when the AA sank three naval landing craft carrying retreating junta troops—pro-military reports at the time claimed that soldiers’ family members were aboard.

Such posts reveal something deeply ugly, celebrating the death of civilians as revenge. Viewed against a pattern of growing aerial strikes on civilians, the attack looks vindictive, targeting a population the military can no longer control on the ground.

The face in the cockpit

Whenever I see burned bodies, cratered markets and smoldering classrooms, one face from my youth comes to mind.

He was one of my closest childhood friends. We went to middle school together, skipped classes sometimes, chewed betel, sneaked away for palm wine and went swimming in the river. Like many teenagers, we occasionally lied to our parents and teachers to hide small mischief. After high school, he entered the Defense Services Academy and eventually became a fighter pilot. I stopped communicating with him after the 2021 coup.

His name has often surfaced in local media reports tracking post-coup air operations. I have no evidence linking him to Kyauktaw, but whenever another school, monastery or market is bombed, I think of him. I wonder how he sleeps after seeing the same photographs the rest of us see. And I want to ask him: for what?

Cowardly operations

The Myanmar Air Force presents itself as the educated, technical elite of the military. In reality, it has forfeited any claim to honor. Since the resistance has no conventional air force, regime pilots face no enemy fighter squadrons. Their overwhelming technological advantage is exercised against forces on the ground and increasingly over communities where civilians live. Its last documented air-to-air combat dates back more than six decades, to the conflict with Kuomintang forces.

Today, when the pilots fly their Chinese and Russian aircraft over villages, markets, monasteries and schools, they remain virtually untouchable. Ground troops, for all the atrocities associated with them, at least enter a battlefield where someone can shoot back. Air Force pilots operate from an overwhelming advantage in the sky, release their bombs and return to base, mostly safely.

The UN Human Rights Office says military airstrikes killed 982 civilians in 2025, including 232 children, an increase of over 50 percent from 641 the previous year. Earlier this month, Nicholas Koumjian of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar said civilians had become the “principal victims” of the military’s increasing reliance on aerial attacks. And its investigations show that the attacks on civilians are deliberate, rather than increasingly frequent pilot error.

International complicity

The chain of complicity does not end with the willing executioners in the air. Much of the military’s combat-aircraft fleet is supplied by Russia and China. Myanmar’s current Air Force chief, Tun Win, received leadership and military-administration training at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom when he was a colonel in the 2010s, according to the Myanmar Defense and Security Institute. That shows Myanmar’s military did not develop in complete international isolation.

After the 2021 coup, Western governments sanctioned military-linked businesses, banks, arms brokers and parts of the aviation-fuel network. Yet the fuel keeps arriving.

Amnesty International found that Myanmar imported at least 109,604 metric tons of aviation fuel last year—69 percent more than in 2024 and the highest annual amount since the coup. Its investigation documented tankers going dark, manipulated tracking signals and opaque ship-to-ship transfers, including vessels previously associated with Iranian fuel shipments.

Governments cannot plausibly claim ignorance. UN investigators have documented civilian casualties and attacks on schools, hospitals, religious buildings and displacement sites. Rights groups have mapped fuel routes, companies and shipping networks. Photographs of the dead reach the world within hours.

After Kyauktaw, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights called again for governments to halt supplies of arms, aviation fuel and dual-use materials. Will the call be heeded this time?

Aftermath

To be sure, more condolences will pour in. Diplomats will say they are alarmed. Statements will express concern. Then another aircraft will take off, perhaps the very next day.

The responsibilities are not identical: a pilot, a fuel supplier and a foreign diplomat do not carry the same legal burden. But each leaves a record of what they did after the consequences became undeniable.

That is what my old childhood friend should think about, but so should the companies, insurers, shippers and financiers whose decisions determine whether Myanmar’s military has the fuel and equipment needed to keep its aircraft flying.

So should the governments that still shake hands with Min Aung Hlaing, the man behind all these massacres, host him on state visits and roll out the red carpet, helping normalize a military regime that bombs civilians at home.

History will record who dropped the bombs. But it will also record who kept the financial channels open, who delivered the aviation fuel, and who continued to treat relations with Myanmar’s military as business as usual.

The people of Myanmar will remember who stood with them and who stood against them. No one who has seen the photographs from Kyauktaw will ever be able to say they did not know.

Nyein Chan Aye is a Burmese journalist based in Washington, D.C., who previously worked for the BBC and Voice of America and writes on Myanmar, the U.S., China and regional affairs.