Myanmar: Myanmar Junta Begins Recruiting Women for Active Military Service

Jan 28, 2025 | RFA Burmese and Nang Hseng Phoo
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Myanmar’s ruling military junta has begun initial steps to draft women for active military service, residents said, showing the military’s desperation to replenish its ranks amid a series of battlefield defeats and desertions in the country’s four-year civil war. Last year, the junta enforced a 2010 military conscription law saying men aged 18-35 and single women 18-27 would be eligible for military service.So far, it has conscripted only men — sometimes by force — but since mid-January, authorities have begun compiling lists of eligible women in the Yangon region, residents in several townships said, suggesting official conscription would begin in the future. “The list of women has already been compiled, and many students are included in it,” said a woman living in Taketa township who she was worried because her 20-year-old daughter, a student at East Yangon University, was on the list for recruitment.