Daily life for civilians in Myanmar has reached a new low, the United Nations said on Tuesday, with a thriving “conflict economy” of unregulated rare earth mining adding to suffering caused by military violence and widespread abuses by armed groups.
Myanmar’s military junta is intensifying airstrikes and arson attacks to quell intense resistance to its rule, and also manipulating access to humanitarian aid to try to control the population, the United Nations said in a report released on Tuesday. The junta took control of Myanmar five years ago, after overthrowing the civilian government.
The report also details the extreme abuses still faced by Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority, nine years after a military offensive that, according to the United Nations, killed about 10,000 people and drove 70,000 more into neighboring Bangladesh.
Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, urged the United Nations Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court. Mr. Türk called the conditions there “a picture of suffering, misery, and cruelty on multiple levels and across the country that is heartbreaking.”
The military had carried out 657 aerial attacks in the last 100 days, causing 146 civilian deaths, James Rodehaver, outgoing head of the U.N. human rights office monitoring Myanmar, told reporters.
The United Nations estimates that military attacks have killed at least 8,302 civilians since the coup, and it said that at least 1,241 civilian deaths occurred in the first five months of the year, including 382 women and 255 children.
“These figures are certainly an underestimation,” it added.
The report comes nine months after the military junta held a sham election that was widely seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy and break out of its diplomatic isolation.
Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of the junta, assumed the post of president and has since traveled in recent weeks to India, China, Thailand and Laos. He also made his fifth visit to Russia since the coup.
Earlier this month, the junta allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit Aung San Suu Kyi, who led the civilian government that was overthrown in February 2020.
She has been largely unseen since the coup, and the junta has refused repeated requests from the U.N. Secretary General’s special envoy to Myanmar and representatives of the Association of South East Asian Nations for permission to see her.
Myanmar also holds at least 14,278 people in detention on political grounds, the U.N. estimates. Although the number of arrests has dropped, the decline appears to be linked to increased forced recruitment into the military.
In Myanmar’s Rakhine state, conditions for the Rohingya are deteriorating amid rampant abuses by both the military and the Arakan Army, a rebel group that now controls most of the area.
Both the military and the Arakan Army are subjecting people there to killings, torture, sexual violence and forced displacement, the United Nations reported.
“Both parties to the conflict committed grave violations against children,” the U.N. said, with children facing violence and forced to fight in the conflict. Children as young as six are also forced to work clearing jungle and constructing buildings, the report said.
Violence and lawlessness across Myanmar have also allowed the development of a thriving illegal economy, the U.N. said. It is built around multibillion dollar online scam operations that are implicated in human trafficking and torture, as well as unregulated mining in Myanmar’s Kachin and Shah states.
Satellite analysis cited by the report showed the number of rare earth mining sites had nearly tripled from 215 before the 2020 coup to 590 by the end of May 2026. Rare earths were mostly sold to China, the report said, with trade peaking at an estimated $1.4 billion in 2023. Recent studies have estimated Myanmar’s rare earth exports at about $625 million, but the report does not explain the significant drop.
Local communities and rights groups said rare earth extraction appeared to be run by foreign interests, the report said, but investigations had found a complex web of interests that allowed subsidiaries of state-owned conglomerates to profit with impunity, leaving local populations to bear most of the economic, environmental and health consequences.
