On the first anniversary of Myanmar’s military coup – 1 February 2022 – 20 soldiers and police turned up at In Ma Htee, ostensibly to protect the village in the central Sagaing Region from armed anti-junta resistance groups known collectively as the People’s Defence Force (PDF).
Whether they wanted to or not, all adult men in the farming village of about 1,700 people were made to join a pro-junta armed militia called the Pyusawhti, according to Win Naing, a resident of In Ma Htee. Their phones were also confiscated, cutting them off from the outside world.
“They started with a few pro-military individuals. After a few days, when more people failed to join voluntarily, we were forced to draw lots,” Win Naing told The New Humanitarian and exiled Myanmar news outlet Myaelatt Athan.
“Some people even attempted suicide because they didn't know how to take up arms and didn't want to join,” Win Naing said. “But if they committed suicide, the soldiers would harm their families, so they felt they had no choice but to comply.”
Win Naing is the only adult male in his household. His eldest son, who works in southern Myanmar, didn’t come home after news broke of the Pyusawhti’s presence in their village. Instead of joining the militia, they arrested Win Naing in the monastery over suspicions he might be linked to the PDF.
During the monsoon in 2024, two years later, Win Naing managed to convince the local junta authorities to let him start farming again. He fled with his extended family a few months later. It required extensive planning, including memorising the places around the village where mines had been laid. The family is now living in a remote displacement camp.
Not everyone was so lucky. Two people from the same village who fled two months earlier were captured and killed by Pyusawhti members, the son of one of the victims told The New Humanitarian and Myaelatt Athan, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“My father and my uncle left on a motorcycle and were found and arrested in a nearby field,” he said. “The Pyusawhti accused them of planting mines, bound them with ropes, and took them back to the village, where they were interrogated, beaten, and ultimately stabbed to death.”
In November 2023, two young members of armed resistance groups were arrested and then burned alive by the Pyusawhti during an unsuccessful raid on a Pyusawhti stronghold near the border of the Sagaing and Magway regions. The UN-appointed Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar has requested information from the military about this incident, but says it has not received any response.
Spreading fear, and fracturing communities
Stories like this reveal why the name “Pyusawhti” – derived from an 18th-century warrior prince known for his mythical powers – strikes fear in people’s hearts in central Myanmar.
Detailed interviews with villagers and former members of the Pyusawhti paint a picture of lawlessness and desperation taking hold, and raise larger questions about how Myanmar can ever rebuild and achieve national reconciliation after such a public fracturing of community ties.
Unlike either the military, the ethnic armed organisations it has been fighting, or the PDF – most of whom operate under the exiled National Unity Government (NUG) – the Pyusawhti is a network of loosely controlled groups rooted in communities in Myanmar’s heartland.
Local residents and researchers say it receives the military’s tacit support and endorsement and provides the regime with a useful – but unofficial – force to spread fear. The complete lack of accountability for their actions is striking even in a country like Myanmar where the military has rarely acknowledged its well-documented history of abuses.
“The military does not need to intervene directly; they can send in these groups first. This way, a lot of violence can occur without the perpetrators wearing uniforms that could be identified on social media.”
Hpone Pyae, a former colonel in the Myanmar army who defected to the armed opposition, said Pyusawhti groups collaborate regularly with the Pyithusit – paramilitary units set up with the explicit blessing and material support of the junta-run military.
“The military does not need to intervene directly; they can send in these groups first,” Hpone Pyae told The New Humanitarian and Myaelatt Athan. “This way, a lot of violence can occur without the perpetrators wearing uniforms that could be identified on social media.”
Across central Myanmar, thousands of fearful residents have fled villages under the control of Pyusawhti.

In Win Naing’s village alone, about 700 people – more than a third of the community – have left, local sources said. Yet escapees often find safety and trust elusive. At least 10 individuals who escaped told The New Humanitarian and Myaelatt Athan they faced suspicion and disapproval from locals in areas controlled by opposition forces. “They didn't believe us at first that we weren't members of Pyusawhti,” said one 40-year-old woman.
Experts on conflict and human rights say the Pyusawhti’s actions are tearing communities apart. If the perpetrators of such abuses are not held accountable, it will be a challenge to restore long-term peace, said *Chit Seng, a Burmese analyst with Thailand-based Fortify Rights.
From mythical origins to murky present
According to early Myanmar folklore, Pyusawhti was a mythical warrior prince who defeated monsters. The modern-day iteration is a very different beast.
The name was first revived in the 1950s, soon after Myanmar gained independence, as a town and village defense scheme intended to assist the military in counter-insurgency activities, but it was disbanded soon after.
It reappeared more than 60 years later, under coup leader Min Aung Hlaing.
Fleeing villagers said Pyusawhti members receive training and weapons from the Myanmar army. In turn, they say, the groups spy on opponents of the coup, block access to villages, force residents to join their ranks, extort money, and burn down houses.
It is difficult to independently verify these accounts, but the Myanmar military and its affiliates have destroyed more than 100,000 homes (as of 31 August 2024), with Sagaing Region alone accounting for nearly three quarters of such losses, according to Data for Myanmar, an independent monitoring group.

In the early days after the coup, the Pyusawhti used Facebook and Telegram to regularly call for investigations into opponents of the coup and threaten members and supporters of the deposed civilian government, led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
In one instance in July 2021, a married couple were shot dead at their home in the Mandalay Region’s Myingyang town days after appearing on a list of a local Pyusawhti chapter as enemies because they were NLD members.
Following that incident, the military’s Burmese-language mouthpiece, Myanma Alinn, identified the Pyusawhti as one of the armed resistance groups operating in central Myanmar. The junta’s spokesperson later claimed the term was an invention of “some subversive media and terrorist groups”, and denied any involvement.
Multiple sources dispute this, and there have been more recent claims of ignorance from the junta.
“I think the military is not being honest when it says there is no Pyusawhti – they know they exist,” said Richard Horsey, political analyst on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group (ICG), which published a report on the Pyusawhti in 2022.
“The Myanmar military uses the Pyusawhti as additional forces on operations, and they are useful in providing local knowledge that soldiers often don’t have,” Horsey added.
A man identified by locals as a Pyusawhti leader in a village in Gangaw Township in Magway Region told The New Humanitarian and Myaelatt Athan that the military provided them with weapons, although he disputed his title. “I don’t know why they call me the Pyusawhti leader,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We are just defending our village from the terrorists. We have various types of weapons.”
A 2023 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) described the Pyusawhti as “undertrained and under-resourced”. While they have “not made a significant impact on conflict dynamics writ large”, they have “contributed to an overall climate of fear”, it added.
This climate of fear has also strained social and cultural ties in a region where a vast majority of people are devout Buddhists. One well-known Pyusawhti leader is a monk called Warthawa, a member of the now-disbanded Buddhist extremist organisation known as Ma Ba Tha.
Ma Ba Tha’s most high-profile member is Ashin Wirathu, a monk released by the junta in September 2021 who is known for inciting hatred against Muslims and opposing the previous civilian government.
Warthawa now commands thousands of recruits and has been enlisting more to join him to fight the PDF, according to local residents. Min Aung Hlaing awarded him the First Class Medal of Merit in 2022 for his charity work and for defending Buddhism.
There have also been reports of tit-for-tat attacks between the Pyusawhti and the PDF.
For example, on 2 December 2023, fires destroyed homes in Kya Paing village in Monywa Township. Local reports claimed that the Pyusawhti had burned 10 people to death in retaliation for an attack by the PDF the previous day. And on 29 November 2024, a battalion of the Local PDF shot and then beheaded a supposed leader of the Pyusawhti who was accused of being a military informant. Video footage of the beheading went viral on pro-military Telegram channels, prompting some junta supporters to call for revenge.
Horsey underlined that it’s important to see the Pyusawhti not just as a military initiative, but also as a militia that has played a significant role in the polarisation of Myanmar society since the coup, and continues to do so.
“I think it will take a very long time to mend the damage done by the coup to community relations. Reconciliation will never be perfect, but it is not impossible,” he said. “Transitional justice can help.”
(*An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Chit Seng as Chit Sai. This corrected version was published on 28 January 2024.)
Harry and Saw Kyaw Nyein are pen names. It is common practice for Burmese journalists to use pen names due to the security risks they face.
Local data consultancy Myanmar Data Citizens contributed to the data visualisations in this article. Edited by Thin Lei Win.