"One evening in late April, a group of young men crouched in the wooded hills overlooking a narrow mountain road outside the town of Mindat, in Myanmar’s Chin State, waiting for the enemy to arrive. As expected, a large truck and three smaller vehicles rumbled up the road carrying soldiers and military equipment. As soon as they came into striking distance, the men in the hills opened fire. “We attacked them with bombs first, and we shot them with handmade rifles,” says Salai*, a leader of the Chinland Defence Force. The militia formed in the wake of Myanmar’s 1 February coup to protect the residents of Chin State—a mountainous, underdeveloped region bordering India and Bangladesh—from military violence. Amid the explosions and gunfire, Salai says he heard the Myanmar soldiers shout: “These men are really doing it! Attack them back!” The battle continued into the night. Eventually, Salai and his comrades decided they had inflicted enough damage and fled back into the hills. They stayed awake and kept watch until morning in case of a counter-attack. They were relieved when they realised every CDF member had come back alive, and they learned later that they had killed three Myanmar soldiers and wounded seven. “That [battle] was a first for all of us,” Salai says. “We didn’t have much experience before, but we did it. We became confident.” In the weeks since, the CDF have mounted several more attacks against the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, in Mindat and throughout Chin State, scoring further victories but also suffering heavy losses. Vastly outgunned, their continued operations show the lengths many Myanmar civilians are willing to go to resist military rule. “I think their actions show the desperation of the people in Chin State, and all over Myanmar, who have suffered for many years at the hand of the Myanmar military,” says Steve Gumaer, president of Partners Relief & Development, which has been providing emergency supplies to displaced civilians in Chin State. “Reports that we have heard are that many people feel like they tried peaceful protests, and in response, many have been killed, so now they are taking up arms to fight for their freedom.”.....Childhood War Games: In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Salai had no intention of taking up arms against the military. A husband and father of two children, he previously worked in the development sector in Chin State, whose predominantly Christian, ethnic Chin population have long resisted pressures to assimilate into Myanmar’s Buddhist, ethnic Bamar majority. Like many other Mindat residents, Salai spent the weeks following the coup joining peaceful protests against military rule. But after Tatmadaw soldiers began shooting protesters in Mindat in mid-February, he and other locals—students, workers, farmers and hunters—started making plans to form a group to protect their families and neighbours from violence and detention. They officially established the Chinland Defence Force on 4 April and established chapters in all nine of Chin State’s townships. On 24 April, Tatmadaw forces arrested seven young protesters in Mindat who were demonstrating in support of the National Unity Government, a government in exile formed by deposed lawmakers. CDF members reached out to military authorities to try to negotiate the detainees’ release. “We urged the junta forces to release our peaceful civilian protesters. They promised at first to release them back to us, but they did not keep their promise and kept detaining them. So we fought their forces,” Salai says. News of the CDF’s modest victory against the Tatmadaw spread on social media, earning praise among anti-coup activists across the country, some of whom have formed local “people’s defence forces” in their own neighbourhoods. The CDF mounted several more guerilla attacks on the Tatmadaw over the following weeks. On 26 April, they allegedly attacked a police convoy near a golf course outside Mindat, killing one security officer and injuring three, according to Myanmar state media. Despite being less well armed than the state security forces stationed across Chin State, the CDF have a few key advantages: knowledge of the rugged terrain, local hunting traditions and access to small explosives and handmade rifles known as tumi, both of which are commonly used for hunting in Chin State. “When we were young, we used to pretend to fight the enemies in this mountainous terrain,” says Pau Pu*, a musician from northern Chin State whose friends and relatives have joined the CDF. “These battles are very similar to our childhood play scenarios.” “[The junta forces] could potentially attack our towns at any time, but the CDF can surely attack them in the jungles, where they have to pass to reach the towns,” Pau Pu says..."