"MRAUK U, Myanmar—Here in the town of Mrauk U, in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state, there has been little to celebrate during this October’s Thadingyut, the second-most important annual festival of the Buddhist calendar. Normally, the auspicious full moon would be hailed with a floating armada of delicate candlelit paper lanterns and song, theater, and dance. Yet this year, there are no celebrations. Instead, at 9 p.m. sharp, a curfew falls as soldiers from the Myanmar Army, known as the Tatmadaw, emerge from their posts to pull barbed wire and steel barricades across roads. Shops and businesses shutter, the streets empty and lights flickering out. Under the looming gaze of hundreds of medieval temples—relics of a time when this was the capital of one of the richest and most powerful states in Southeast Asia—parents gather up their children by flashlight and head into makeshift bunkers, dug into the soft clay beneath their houses. These gimcrack dugouts, ringed with old sand-filled cement bags, may not look much, but they provide at least some shelter from the shells, rockets, and bullets now increasingly flying between the Tatmadaw and local rebels, up above..."