Document leak: Myanmar authorities ordered to strictly meet conscription quotas — BBC News
Myanmar authorities have been ordered to strictly meet quotas for replenishing the army, BBC News reports, citing leaked documents. Against this backdrop, residents of Hpa-An, the capital of the southern Karen State, report that young men are being detained by people in civilian clothes and forcibly recruited for military service.
According to a 26-year-old tuk-tuk driver, who asked not to be identified by his real name for security reasons, young and able-bodied residents of the city are afraid to go outside after dark. Some young people have left for Thailand or to relatives in other parts of the country.
Mandatory service
Myanmar has been in a state of civil war since the military coup in February 2021. Three years later, the military introduced compulsory service: men aged 18 to 35 and women aged 18 to 27 must serve for at least two years. Refusal is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Naung Yoe, a military affairs representative at the Myanmar Defense and Security Institute and a former officer who joined the civil disobedience movement, told the BBC that security forces track young people's movements, detain people on the pretext that they meet conscription criteria, threaten imprisonment to extort money, and carry out arrests during checks of resident lists. According to the BBC's estimate, since the beginning of 2024, the junta has conscripted about 100,000 young people, with a significant portion subjected to coercion, extortion or abduction.
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International human rights organizations Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights have also reported abductions of civilians and forced recruitment into the military. Research organization Myanmar Witness said that the number of missing-person notices in January rose from four in 2021 to 82 in 2025; most of those missing were men and boys.
Claims of selling conscripts
Yangon resident Ma Moe San Pan said that her 33-year-old husband, Phyo Wai, was taken to the ward administration in May 2025, and later called from a military recruitment center in another part of the city. According to her, a relative who worked in the ward administration transferred her husband to another ward to meet its conscription quota for 4 million kyat. The BBC was unable to contact this relative.
Ward administrator U Maung Maung Lwin acknowledged that he was involved in referring Phyo Wai to military recruitment authorities. At the same time, he denied that money had been transferred for this. The woman said police accepted her complaints regarding the circumstances of her husband's conscription and fraud, but refused to classify the first episode as human trafficking.
In late August, Yangon police detained a fire service employee and his son-in-law on suspicion of abducting four young men who, according to the BBC, were allegedly intended to be sold for conscription. The men, the outlet reported, were lured with promises of employment and held in specially equipped rooms. The fire service employee was charged with abduction or unlawful deprivation of liberty and faces up to seven years in prison.
