Impose Jet Fuel and Weapons Embargo on Myanmar Junta

Fortify Rights
6 days ago
7 min read

Fortify Rights Report

Sept. 4, 2025

New report names 22 junta commanders linked to deadly airstrikes on civilians

*A woman cries out in grief after losing family members in a Myanmar military airstrike in Konlaw village, Momauk Township, Kachin State on November 17, 2024. ©Hkun Li, 2024*

(BANGKOK, September 4, 2025)— A new report published by Fortify Rights today reveals the identities of 22 Myanmar military junta officials responsible for deadly airstrikes on civilians and protected sites in Kachin and Karenni states—attacks likely amounting to war crimes under international law. The investigation provides new evidence directly linking specific military leaders, units, and airbases to unlawful aerial bombardments of schools, churches, displacement camps, hospitals, and homes between October 2023 and November 2024.

U.N. member states—convening later this month in New York for the General Assembly— should push the Security Council to impose a global embargo on jet fuel and arms to the Myanmar military junta, adopt such measures unilaterally if necessary, and ensure the Council refers the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC), said Fortify Rights.

“These attacks didn’t happen by accident. They were planned, authorized, and carried out through a chain of command that remains intact and emboldened,” said Chit Seng, Human Rights Associate at Fortify Rights. “Every survivor we spoke with carries traumatic memories of these brutal attacks: the sound of jets, the smell of blood, the fear of being targeted again. Restricting arms and aviation fuel and pursuing criminal accountability against the Myanmar junta is the international community’s legal and moral obligation.”

*Crater left by airstrikes on a school in Loi Nan Pha village, Demoso Township, Karenni State. ©Min Htet San, 2024*

The new 86-page report, “Crashing Down on Us”: Myanmar Military Junta Aerial Attacks, War Crimes, and Impunity in Kachin and Karenni States, is based on 63 interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, internally displaced persons, humanitarian workers, and ethnic resistance organization members from Kachin and Karenni states. It also draws on leaked military documents, video and photographic evidence, and open-source data.

In addition to naming 22 junta commanders responsible for the specific attacks described in the report, the report also identifies eight military command centers from which the attacks were ordered or authorized and 12 military units linked to the airstrikes and artillery attacks.

Fortify Rights investigated 10 specific airstrikes on civilians and protected sites in Kachin and Karenni states that killed and injured scores of civilians and destroyed schools, churches, homes, displacement camps, and a hospital. Evidence shows the junta repeatedly failed to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and legitimate military targets, with its attacks often following battlefield defeats—indicating collective punishment, a crime under international law.

By late 2024, the military junta controlled approximately 21 percent of Myanmar's territory, with the rest contested or under the control of resistance forces. Having lost control of more than half its bases nationwide—an unprecedented setback—the junta has escalated its use of indiscriminate airstrikes on civilian communities.

The Myanmar junta is the only armed force in the country with the capacity to carry out airstrikes, possessing combat aircraft and the supporting logistical infrastructure. Ethnic armed organizations and resistance groups in the country do not have aircraft and are limited to ground-based operations, taking to the skies only with commercial drones adapted to drop small explosives.

“These airstrikes were deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure,” said Sai Arkar, Human Rights Associate at Fortify Rights. “These attacks reflect a broader strategy of seeking retaliation and inducing terror, and they are aimed at punishing entire communities for the military’s losses on the ground.”

One of the deadliest airstrikes documented in “Crashing Down on Us” occurred on November 15, 2024, when a junta aircraft bombed a Baptist church sheltering more than 70 displaced civilians in Konlaw village, Momauk Township, Kachin State. The attack killed nine, including an entire family of six. There were no armed clashes in the area, and the village was under junta control at the time.

“Seng Mai,” 41, who lost six family members in the attack, told Fortify Rights:

I saw a combat airplane ... around 3:30 p.m. ... I was in the village at the time. [My relatives] were displaced from Momauk, so they sought refuge in the church. ... In the three-story building [a temporary internally displaced persons’ shelter inside the church compound], the children [were killed] on the lower level while my sister was outside, in close proximity to the entrance. The explosive blew up precisely at the entryway of the building.

*The interior of a Kachin Baptist church in Konlaw village, Momauk Township after an airstrike carried out by the Myanmar military junta. ©Hkun Li, 2024*

The military also carried out repeated airstrikes on the “Bangkok” camp for internally displaced persons in Pekon Township, located near the border of Karenni and Shan states. On September 5, 2024, at approximately 9:15 p.m., a junta aircraft dropped bombs on the camp, killing nine people, including six children, and injuring 19 others. The bombs destroyed shelters, a school, and other critical civilian infrastructure.

“All we have here are internally displaced persons who are helpless and facing many struggles already,” said “Akayar,” a math teacher who lost his wife and two-year-old son in the attack. “They didn’t need to attack us with an airstrike.”

Fortify Rights also documented airstrikes in and around Laiza, a town on the Myanmar-China border that is home to civilians as well as the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Organization. A 44-year-old Laiza resident and civilian told Fortify Rights that after enduring multiple airstrikes, “It felt like the world was crashing down on us.”

These and other attacks documented in the report amount to serious violations of international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of war, which prohibit deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian objects. In non-international armed conflicts, all parties, including the Myanmar military, are legally required to distinguish between military and civilian targets and to refrain from attacks expected to cause disproportionate harm to civilians.

The report provides evidence that the junta’s aerial attacks were indiscriminate or deliberately targeted civilians and were carried out in areas without active clashes or military targets, including religious sites, civilian homes, schools, and camps sheltering internally displaced civilians. Such attacks constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute of the ICC and customary international law.

The 2022 publication “Nowhere is Safe” by Fortify Rights and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, which documented the junta’s crimes against humanity following its attempted coup d’état in 2021, named and identified several of the same junta commanders named in the new report.

“Crashing Down on Us” makes 25 recommendations to the ICC, U.N. Security Council, U.N. Member States, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the National Unity Government of Myanmar, and others. Fortify Rights also highlights the role of aviation fuel, weapons, and military equipment suppliers, who may be complicit in the Myanmar junta’s war crimes.

Fortify Rights warned that concerted international action is urgent in light of the U.S. government’s recent decision under President Donald Trump to lift sanctions on junta-affiliated companies and individuals involved in the arms and jet fuel trade.

The organization stressed that lifting sanctions on the junta and its enablers—particularly on individuals and companies tied to the logistics, defense, and supply chains that enable deadly airstrikes—"was wrong on every level” and called on Congress to act swiftly and in a bipartisan manner to defend democracy, protect human rights, and pursue accountability for atrocities in Myanmar.

In addition to the evidence published today in “Crashing Down on Us,” subsequent Fortify Rights research shows that the junta continued to carry out airstrikes during self-declared ceasefires earlier this year, even bombing civilians in earthquake-affected zones. On May 12, during the ceasefire period, junta aircraft dropped bombs on a school in Sagaing Region, killing at least 22 schoolchildren and two teachers, and injuring 100 more. Fortify Rights is also currently investigating continued junta airstrikes on civilian infrastructure in Karenni State between June and August 2025, showing a persistent and continuing policy of attacks on civilians.

The Security Council has the legal authority under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter to mandate arms embargoes to maintain or restore international peace and security. The Myanmar military's widespread attacks on civilians before and after the 2021 attempted coup d’état have displaced more than 3.4 million people and forced more than a million to flee to neighboring countries as refugees, creating one of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and constituting threats to peace and security.

On December 21, 2022, the U.N. Security Council adopted its first-ever resolution on Myanmar since the country’s independence in 1948, denouncing the junta’s human rights violations. However, the resolution failed to mandate action by U.N. member states. Earlier, on June 18, 2021, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution calling on all states to prevent arms transfers to Myanmar, which passed with 119 votes in favor, 36 abstentions, and only one vote, from Belarus, against the resolution.

“Every airstrike is initiated with a decision by a person in power, and we’ve traced those unlawful decisions to specific commanders, command centers, airbases where aircraft departed, and the supply chain enabling it all,” said Chit Seng. “Now is the time for accountability.”

“The international community must gather the political will to stop these atrocities,” said Sai Arkar. “It has the tools to hold the Myanmar junta accountable, and now it must use them.”