Word: kia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...body. Felix has never fought in the jungles of northeastern Burma, where a rebel army is preparing for war with one of Asia's largest militaries. With no heavy artillery and little more than flip-flops and used flashlights to give their recruits, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) can only depend on guerrilla tactics to deter soldiers of the Burmese military regime. The 24-year-old cadet at the KIA's military academy, deep in the monsoon-drenched hills of Kachin state, juts his chin out, blinks back tears and announces he is ready for deployment. "I am shaking very...
...Jungle To get to the KIA's mountainous stronghold of Laiza, I first traveled deep into China's southwestern Yunnan province, to a small trading settlement called Nabang. Even though the border town is in China, many of its residents wore Burmese longyis, or sarongs, and women's faces were painted beige with the thanaka paste used in Burma as a skin salve. Despite the occasional truck rumbling past overloaded with teak logs from Burma, Nabang felt like it was just emerging from an opium-induced...
...quick splash across a few bamboo planks strewn across a river and I entered another world. Laiza was very much awake, a hair-trigger atmosphere only heightened by the fact that practically every teenaged boy appeared to have a machine gun slung over his shoulder. Soldiers from the KIA's mobile brigade materialized from the sub-tropical canopy, stealthy as the tigers that prowl Kachin state. As my jeep climbed up a mountain path, I passed teenagers with the hardened gazes of men trudging toward a military-recruiting office. The number of youth who have volunteered to enlist has skyrocketed...
...Many of these youngsters fit Hollywood casting for Southeast Asian guerrillas: scrawny, scrappy adolescents who show no sign of needing a shave anytime soon. But Felix, who sidled up to me as I watched the KIA academy cadets run through their drills, disturbed the easy image of a militia conscripting hungry boys in return for a fistful of rice. Armed with a university degree in international relations, Felix speaks fluent English and expresses himself eloquently on political philosophy. But as an ethnic Kachin - an ethnicity more than 1 million strong, famed for its fortitude while serving on the Allied side...
...recent months, the decades of persistent discrimination have spawned an unusual alliance between four armed ethnic groups: the KIA, the United Wa State Army, the Eastern Shan State Army (also known as the Mongla army) and the Kokang Army. The junta's lightning strike on the Kokang capital Laogai, which is estimated to have caused some 200 civilian casualties, left the other alliance members ill-equipped to respond immediately. But exile groups in China and Thailand are reporting that the Wa - which, with some 25,000 foot soldiers and an arsenal of heavy artillery, is the strongest of the rebel...