Myanmar's military regime acknowledged Monday it had lost communications with the commanders of a strategically important army headquarters in the northeast, adding credence to a militia group's claims it had captured the base.
The fall of the army's Northeast Command in Lashio city would be the biggest in a series of setbacks for Myanmar's military government this year, as an offensive by an alliance of powerful militias of ethnic minority groups makes broad gains in the civil war.
"The regime's loss of the Northeast Command is the most humiliating defeat of the war," said Morgan Michaels, a Singapore-based analyst with the International Institute of Strategic Studies who runs its Myanmar Conflict Map project. "Without Lashio, it will be extremely difficult for the regime to hold onto its final outposts in the theater."
Those include the key Muse border crossing with China, as well as the strategic crossroads at Kyaukme, and it opens the way for attacks on Pyin Oo Lwin and Myanmar's second-largest city, Mandalay, Michaels said.
In a video broadcast Monday night on state television, the head of the ruling military council. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, gave a vague account of the base's fall, saying some security forces in northern Shan State left their outposts because keeping people safe was their priority.
