Key Takeaways
- The junta now controls a minority of Myanmar. Five years after the February 2021 coup, independent estimates put the military's firm control at roughly 21–33% of the country. One survey credited resistance forces with about 38% of the territory by the end of 2025, with the rest actively contested.
- The west has effectively seceded. The Arakan Army holds around 14 of Rakhine State's 17 townships, leaving the junta clinging to the capital Sittwe and the Chinese-backed Kyaukphyu port. In Chin State, resistance forces overran the last junta base in 2025.
- Operation 1027 won ground, then fractured. The Three Brotherhood Alliance's 2024 northern offensive seized dozens of towns, but Chinese pressure forced Lashio back to the junta and, in March 2026, the MNDAA turned its guns on its ally the TNLA, capturing Kutkai.
- The dry-zone heartland is a grinding stalemate. Sagaing remains the resistance heartland under relentless airstrikes, while Karenni fighters besiege Loikaw and Kachin's KIA presses junta battalions around Bhamo and the rare-earth belt.
- A humanitarian catastrophe underneath the map. Roughly 4.5 million people are internally displaced and the UN projects up to 16 million will need aid in 2026, as air campaigns hit hospitals and the December 2025 elections were cancelled across much of the country.
Five years after the generals seized power, the question of who actually rules Myanmar no longer has a simple answer. The military council that staged the February 2021 coup once expected to consolidate control within months. Instead, it has spent half a decade losing ground — first to a sprawling patchwork of newly formed People’s Defence Forces, then to battle-hardened ethnic armies that smelled weakness and went on the offensive.
By mid-2026 the country is carved into a mosaic of overlapping control: a shrinking junta-administered core in the central lowlands and big cities, vast contested borderlands where ethnic armed organizations and resistance fighters hold the upper hand, and active front lines that shift town by town. This is the map of that fragmentation — where the fighting is, who is winning, and why no side can quite finish the job.
Who Controls Myanmar in 2026
There is no single authoritative ledger of control in Myanmar, and credible sources disagree on the totals: a 2026 UN Security Council briefing cited a junta footprint of about 21% of the country, independent mapping projects put it closer to a third, and one field survey credited the resistance with roughly 38% of the territory by 31 December 2025. What every assessment agrees on is the direction of travel — the military is administering less of Myanmar each year. The interactive map below shows which side holds the upper hand in each state and region. Control is fluid and decided township by township, so treat it as a snapshot, not a fixed border.
The West Has Slipped Away: Rakhine and Chin
Nowhere has the junta’s position collapsed more completely than along the western coast. The Arakan Army (AA), the most powerful of the ethnic armies, now controls all but three of Rakhine State’s 17 townships, administering a near-contiguous territory across the rural interior and coastline. The military is pinned into a handful of urban islands — the state capital Sittwe, the strategically vital Kyaukphyu deep-sea port that anchors a Chinese pipeline corridor, and Manaung island. Heavy fighting raged around Kyaukphyu in November 2025, and a December 2025 airstrike on Mrauk-U General Hospital underscored how the junta has leaned on air power as ground control slips away.
In neighbouring Chin State, the picture is similar. Chin resistance forces — a mix of the Chin National Army and the Chin Brotherhood — captured Falam and overran the last junta base in the state in 2025, then deepened cooperation with the AA next door. Together, Rakhine and Chin form a resistance-dominated belt across Myanmar’s western flank.
The North: Operation 1027’s Promise and Collapse
The most dramatic chapter of the war unfolded in northern Shan State. On 10 October 2024, the Three Brotherhood Alliance — the MNDAA, the TNLA and the AA — launched a renewed Operation 1027, capturing a string of towns and junta outposts along the Chinese border in a matter of weeks. For a moment it looked as if the entire north might fall.
Then Beijing intervened. China, anxious to protect its border trade and pipelines, leaned hard on the alliance: the captured city of Lashio was handed back to the regime in 2025, and the coalition began to fray. The breakdown turned violent in March 2026, when the MNDAA captured Kutkai — not from the junta, but from its own former ally the TNLA — detaining fighters and seizing trade gates in a move analysts read as a realignment toward Beijing. The Brotherhood Alliance that had humbled the military a year earlier had effectively shattered.
Further north in Kachin State, the Kachin Independence Army told a different story, seizing dozens of junta positions around Bhamo and forcing the military into reprisal airstrikes. By 2026 the junta was fighting to claw back the rare-earth mining belt near the Chinese border — a reminder that in Myanmar’s borderlands, resources and control are inseparable.
The Heartland Front: Sagaing, the Dry Zone and the Karenni Hills
The war’s bloodiest stalemate sits in the central dry zone. Sagaing Region is the heartland of the People’s Defence Forces, who administer much of the countryside even as the military answers with near-daily airstrikes and scorched-earth raids. To the east, Karenni (Kayah) fighters have spent two years besieging the state capital Loikaw, while in Kayin (Karen) State the Karen National Liberation Army struck the Taungoo air base and overran roadside outposts. PDFs even captured Thabeikkyin in Mandalay Region, edging the war toward the junta’s symbolic core. The map below pins the towns that changed hands or saw major fighting in 2025 and 2026.
A Country in Pieces: The Human Cost
Behind every shaded zone on the map is a displacement crisis. Humanitarian monitors counted roughly 4.5 million internally displaced people by May 2026, and the UN’s 2026 response plan projects that up to 16 million Myanmar citizens will need assistance. Airstrikes on hospitals, schools and markets surged through 2025 as the military traded territory for firepower. The junta’s long-promised elections, staged in phases over December 2025 and January 2026, could not be held across wide stretches of the country because the government simply did not control the ground — the clearest possible verdict on the map above.
The Bottom Line
Myanmar in 2026 is neither a junta state nor a liberated one. It is a fractured patchwork in which the military retains the cities, the centre and a decisive edge in air power, while resistance forces and ethnic armies hold most of the map by area — yet remain too divided, and too pressured by outside powers like China, to deliver a knockout blow. The result is a stalemate measured not in front lines but in townships, and paid for in the largest displacement crisis in the country’s history. The borders on this map will keep moving; the fragmentation they describe is likely to outlast the fighting.
Territorial estimates in Myanmar vary by source and definition; this map synthesises the assessments below and should be read as a provisional snapshot.
