Who Won the U.S. Presidential Debate?

Within days, the MNDAA was waving its flag over a major border gate and showing off large hauls of newly-seized weapons in one of the most dramatic resistance advances since the coup. Sources working inside Laukkai’s scamming compounds, however, told Al Jazeera they had little idea what was happening outside.

Htun first noticed something was amiss when mobile networks went dead and he had to scam using wi-fi instead. Then the electricity stopped, and on November 20, he awoke to realise that his company’s bosses and Chinese workers had fled. “They had all disappeared,” he said. “Only then did we manage to leave.”

Ja Hkawn, a former university student from Kachin State, who was working as a cashier in a grocery store at a scamming operation at the time and who is going by a pseudonym, knew changes were happening when the security guards traded their militia uniforms for civilian clothes and opened the doors to make the building appear like a hotel.

Then the Chinese bosses and workers fled, leaving those from Myanmar to fend for themselves. A month later, running out of food and without power to charge their phones, Ja Hkawn and her roommate fled too.

It was late November, and Laukkai was on the brink of war. A frantic evacuation was under way, and roads were jammed with tens of thousands of people attempting to escape. Most were stuck at the city gates, however, where resistance forces were restricting passage due to the fighting – especially after two incidents in which residents were killed by stray artillery fire as they tried to flee.

• Read More