Inside the secret hospital for the wounded soldiers of Myanmar's resistance
Before the war, Ko Khant was a chef in Yangon. He made Western-style food: burgers, bread and pasta. Only a teenager then, he knew little of dictators. In his sheltered, small world inside Myanmar's biggest city, he knew even less of the rebel armies on his nation's faraway frontiers. Soon, both would consume him.
More than 200 kilometres to the east of Yangon, another young man had worked the rice paddies at a village in the Myanmar borderlands with Thailand. Min Aung, then 21, had no other vocational ambition than this. One day, perhaps, he would be a husband and father.
Then, on February 1, 2021, Ko and Min's vastly different worlds collapsed. Myanmar's military, known as the Tatmadaw, rolled through Yangon and the capital of Naypyidaw, blocking streets, shutting down the internet and imprisoning members of the recently re-elected civilian government, including its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
It was a coup. The generals, unable to accept their proxy party's massive defeat, took power for themselves, ending Myanmar's six-year interval of electoral democracy. And so began a civil war. By its fourth anniversary this year, it had claimed an estimated 50,000 lives, including those of 6000 civilians.
In time, these horrific events, overshadowed by atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine, would deposit Ko and Min here, a large but otherwise unremarkable-seeming elevated home at a secret location in Thailand.
Behind the ordinary gates, ethnic Karen nurses, physiotherapists and various other volunteers treat about 120 men. Many of the patients are amputees. At least one young man, keen to show off the long scars running across his crown, carried an acquired brain injury.
It is a clandestine rehabilitation hospital for those wounded fighting to free Myanmar from the brutal military regime. This masthead was recently given rare access inside the property on the condition that no one was photographed without their permission and that no identifying particulars were published. The secrecy stemmed from the fear that Thai authorities, who had not given permission for the operation and would not want to be seen as picking sides in the war, could move to shut it down.
Downstairs on the open-walled ground level, men passed the hours on their phones. Dogs wandered among electric fans and makeshift beds. Power cords and drying clothes hung from the low ceiling above concrete floors. Upstairs, an amateur cook stirred a giant pot of catfish curry.
This masthead met Ko and Min separately inside a small treatment room that doubled as an office. A painting of Suu Kyi furnished one of the walls. On another was a sketch of a man bending open prison bars, with words printed in English: 'Nobody can restrain our spirit from injustice chains.'
'I don't regret what happened to me,' said Ko, leaning forward in a plastic chair, the stump of his right wrist propped on the armrest. 'I only regret getting injured so early.'
Flee or give in
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After the coup, rural villagers like Min, with no money to pay off marauding Tatmadaw conscription officers, fled or gave in to the threats. Min chose to flee, soon linking up with the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), a powerful and long-established ethnic armed organisation fighting for self-determination – and now against the junta – out of eastern Myanmar.
In Yangon and other cities, street protests demanding the new regime step down were met with killings, torture and arrests.
Ko, who at first neither believed nor understood what had happened in his country, eventually joined the heaving crowds with an enthusiasm that saw him marked for punishment. He, too, fled deep into the countryside.
'I stayed out there for about three days, but I couldn't hide any more,' he said. 'I said goodbye to the people at home and told them I was going to join the revolution.'
Like Min, he joined the KNLA, completing a few months of basic training before being sent to the fluid front lines.
Ko and Min were among tens of thousands of ordinary Myanmar civilians – doctors, teachers, chefs and farmers – who took up arms to fight the new military regime. Some joined ethnic armies. Others joined the People's Defence Force, the newly formed armed wing of the ousted government.
The KNLA put Ko to work as part of a team collecting unexploded ordnance to be repurposed as landmines. One day, part of a 120-pound mortar that Ko was handling blew up, tearing off his right hand and blinding him in his left eye.
'If the whole bomb exploded, you wouldn't find my body any more,' he said.
After recuperating at the secret hospital but no longer able to fight, Ko stayed on as a volunteer, teaching the wounded soldiers how to cook, and supporting them in their darker hours.
'In the future, I plan to start a business to earn money and support this place if possible,' he said. 'I am more comfortable with the knife now [in my left hand], though I cannot work as fast as before.'
The resistance has made some stunning gains, but the regime remains entrenched in Myanmar's centre. Using Russian-made warplanes, the weakened Tatmadaw has been able to sustain a brutal and often indiscriminate bombing campaign across rebel-held portions of the country.
Last month, an airstrike on a school in central Sagaing region reportedly killed as many as 20 students.
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Min, who was wheeled into the small treatment room after Ko had returned to his volunteer duties, said he longed to return to the war. But a man needs legs to fight the Tatmadaw.
He recounted how his team had stormed a military base held by 50 regime soldiers. At the entrance, Min stepped on a landmine. Later that day, one of his friends stepped on a landmine, too, and was 'cut in half'. Eventually, his comrades took the base.
'All I can do right now is wait for my full recovery and discharge from the hospital,' he said, rubbing one of his still-bandaged stumps. 'After that, I will go back to my battalion and stay with my commander.
'I will follow him and guard him. I will cook for him and become a chef for him and the other soldiers. I cannot go to the front line and fight with them any more. I can only help from the back.'
Even if the regime collapsed and peace returned to Myanmar, Min would never again farm the rice paddies of his village. Nor, he lamented, would he start a family.
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