Burma’s (Myanmar’s) military junta has never disclosed how many people it has conscripted. When it activated the People’s Military Service Law in February 2024, the regime said it would draft 5,000 people per batch, or about 50,000 a year, from a pool of about 13 million eligible citizens. By September 2026, it had reached Batch 28.
The Myanmar Defense and Security Institute (MDSI), a research group founded by defected officers, estimates that more than 130,000 new soldiers have been recruited since the law took effect. The national quota was raised in April to 5,000 recruits weekly.
According to sources close to the regime, only about 631 of the first batch’s 5,155 recruits had been allowed to return home two years after their training began.
The law covers men aged 18 to 35, women aged 18 to 27, and professionals up to age 45. In practice, the burden falls on the poor, because wealthy families that receive a summons can pay poorer young men to serve in their place.
In Hpa-An, the Karen State capital, authorities mainly target casual laborers, masons, shop employees, and commuters. They also target internal migrant workers who fled fighting in the Ayeyarwady, Bago, Magway, and Sagaing regions. In Taunggyi, the Shan State capital, the junta abducted 140 men in a single week in November 2024, most of them drug users who were out at night.
In Mandalay, high school students have been entered into conscription lotteries, and ward administrators have threatened to arrest parents who fail to attend. Since January 2026, the junta has been compiling lists of women aged 18 to 27 in Hsihseng Township, southern Shan State.
The MDSI documented 23 child recruits, some as young as 15, at four training camps. Human Rights Watch reported that the military abducted and forcibly recruited more than 1,000 Rohingya men and boys from Rakhine State.
Most conscripts are not drafted through formal summonses. The MDSI found that about 70 percent of conscripts in military camps were recruited through threats, arrests, or nighttime abductions. In Yangon alone, the monitoring group Rangoon Scout Network recorded 573 young people forcibly detained across 33 townships between January and August 2026.
In Kengtung, eastern Shan State, troops have shifted from nighttime raids to seizing young men in public in the early evening, using unmarked private vehicles. In September 2026, junta forces and the allied Tangutan militia abducted nearly 200 young people in Putao and Machanbaw townships, Kachin State. About 100 of them were flown out of the state to training centers and frontline areas.
Recruiters also use false job offers. One Yangon man was offered work loading construction materials for 40,000 kyats ($10) a day but was instead sold into military recruitment. Two conscripts who surrendered to the Arakan Army said officers planted illegal drugs in one man’s hands, photographed him, and gave him a choice between military service and prison. Brokers have also handed young men deported from Thailand over to junta administrators at the border for recruitment.
Abducted recruits are sold along a chain of buyers. In Yangon, taxi drivers, labor brokers, and members of the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia sell people grabbed off streets for 150,000 to 300,000 kyats each ($35 to $70).
A village administrator in Mandalay Region told RFA that militias and others linked to the military capture people on officers’ orders and hand them over to brokers. He said brokers buy these captives for 4 to 5 million kyats ($1,000 to $1,250) and resell them to administrators for about 15 million kyats ($4,000). The administrator admitted buying recruits from brokers every three months to fill his village’s quota. When a recruit comes from another township, immigration officials issue him a new ID card, with brokers paying the officials.
A substitute who passes the medical examination can sell for up to 30 million kyats ($7,500). One Yangon man was sold for 15 million kyats ($3,800), sent to the front, and killed fighting the Arakan Army in Kyaukphyu on May 18, 2026. In Myawaddy, on the Thai border, abducted youths are sold as substitutes for 4 to 10 million kyats ($1,000 to $2,500).
Families who can afford it buy their sons back. In Kengtung, parents pay ransoms of up to 10 million kyats (about $2,400) for abducted youths. In Hpa-An, one family paid 1 million kyats (about $250) for a young man’s release, even after he proved he lived locally. In Putao, a village administrator’s son was freed after his family paid 20 million kyats (about $5,000). A family in Magway Region paid the same amount. However, RFA reported that some captives are sent to training even after their families pay the ransom.
The practice has drawn condemnation even from within the junta’s own camp. On August 4, Ko Ko Htwe, a Mandalay Region lawmaker from the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party, told the regional parliament that “military service fees” collected from households were being used to buy young people for military service. He described the practice as akin to human trafficking.
While families pay millions of kyats to buy their sons’ freedom, the junta places little value on conscripts’ lives.
Confidential military documents show that conscripts make up over 70 percent of some deployment columns. Defected Captain Zin Yaw said regular officers serve in core units while conscripts are assigned to the flanks and the most dangerous frontline positions. A conscript captured by the Arakan Army said conscripts account for most casualties, while another said they are sent forward without enough ammunition. Conscripts are also used as porters and human shields.
Defectors told The Irrawaddy that conscripts are used as cannon fodder in offensives to retake territory. Captured conscripts told Development Media Group that officers put new recruits at the front of attacks under threat of being shot if they retreat, a threat echoed by a conscript who described being sent on an impossible mission. A defector said an officer shot his conscripted friend in the head for retreating. Two conscripts who tried to escape were tied to a tree within the Arakan Army’s sniper sights as punishment. Resistance fighters on the Karen front say they periodically pause fighting so junta units can collect the bodies of conscripts killed in wave after wave.
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After five Rohingya forced recruits were killed in fighting in Rakhine State, military authorities promised their families 1 million kyats ($476) and two sacks of rice. Some families receive nothing at all. The widow of a first-batch conscript killed in Rakhine told Frontier Myanmar that she had received nothing from the military since his death. Her husband had been promised a basic salary of 150,000 kyats plus a 100,000-kyat hardship allowance but received no money during training.
Even modest death payments can be avoided. A defected army captain told Frontier that the military lists soldiers killed in action as missing when their bodies are not recovered, denying compensation to many families.
