World
Young men trapped between war and conscription in Myanmar’s Rakhine
Since war resumed in his native Rakhine State last November, Thura Maung has seen his options narrow.
The 18-year-old, from the state’s ethnic Rakhine majority, first fled his home in the coastal town of Myebon in December, when clashes between the military and autonomy-seeking Arakha Army – formerly known as the Arakan Army – seemed imminent.
He and his family escaped by boat, travelling along river inlets at night to avoid being seen by the military. They returned a few days later, but fled twice more over the following months as the fighting escalated.
By February, the military and AA were battling for control over Myebon, and Thura Maung could hear shelling from the village where he had taken shelter. The military had also blocked the movement of goods and shut down the internet in areas affected by the conflict, leaving his family struggling to make ends meet.
With his university effectively closed due to the fighting, he felt his dreams slipping away. “There were no opportunities for my life to develop, and I saw no future,” he said.
It’s a feeling shared by Zubair, an ethnic Rohingya from Rakhine State’s northern Maungdaw township. The 24-year-old was doing an internship with a civil society organisation focused on peacebuilding when the fighting broke out and his office closed.
Soon, he was running from the war as well as a military conscription drive targeting Rohingya men. “We weren’t able to stay at home, go to work or even sleep on time,” he said. “Time that we could’ve spent working on our futures was wasted.”
Zubair and Thura Maung are part of a new generation of young people across Myanmar whose lives have been turned upside down by the 2021 military coup. In Rakhine State, people had already lived through years of communal conflict and a brutal 2017 military crackdown on the mostly Muslim Rohingya. The escalating violence between the military and AA has only made matters worse, according to Karen Simbulan, a human rights lawyer specialising in conflict sensitivity in Rakhine.
“With the most recent renewed fighting and the looming threat of forced conscription, many who had persisted and stayed in Rakhine despite everything are seeing their futures taken away from them,” she said. “Many are taking significant risks to flee to safety, often putting themselves in highly vulnerable situations just to survive.”
Al Jazeera spoke with four young men from Rakhine State about the effects of the conflict on their lives. They have all been given pseudonyms to protect their safety.
‘Stirring up communal tensions’
The renewed fighting is the latest crisis to hit Rakhine State, home to Daingnet, Mro, Khami, Kaman, Maramagyi, Chin and Hindu minorities as well as the Rohingya, and the mostly Buddhist Rakhine majority. A category four cyclone hit the region last May, following successive waves of violence in the decade leading up to the coup.
In 2012, mobs of ethnic Rakhine and Rohingya people attacked each other with sticks and knives and burned each other’s homes, leaving dozens dead and some 140,000 forced from their homes. Afterwards, the military imposed tough restrictions on Rohingyas’ movement and access to services, while continuing to deny them citizenship under a discriminatory 1982 law.
The situation deteriorated dramatically in 2016 and 2017 when the military killed thousands of Rohingya civilians and committed widespread sexual violence and arson following attacks on military outposts by a Rohingya armed group. Its “clearance operations” in northern Rakhine State drove more than 750,000 people into neighbouring Bangladesh, and the crackdown is the subject of continuing genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice.
The AA stepped up its fight for autonomy in late 2018; over the next two years, Rakhine State endured some of the most intense armed clashes seen in Myanmar in decades. The military also indiscriminately bombed and shelled civilian areas, committing what Amnesty International identified as war crimes.
The military and AA reached an informal ceasefire in November 2020, just three months before the generals seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Weeks later, the military cracked down on peaceful protests across Myanmar with gunfire and arrests. An armed uprising soon followed; by mid-2021, all-out war had erupted across the country.
Existing ethnic armed organisations trained and fought alongside anti-coup People’s Defence Forces (PDF), but the AA mostly stayed out of the fray, instead focusing on establishing governance mechanisms in its territory through its administrative wing, the United League of Arakan.
That changed last October, when the AA joined ethnic armed groups fighting on Myanmar’s eastern border with China to launch Operation 1027 declaring their intent to eradicate “oppressive military dictatorship”. Within weeks, they had seized strategic territory and undertaken other resistance offensives across the country, and on November 13, the AA brought the war to Rakhine soil with coordinated attacks on military positions.
The AA and its allies have since driven out the military from most of central and northern Rakhine State as well as Paletwa township in neighbouring Chin State. Following tactics it has long used to punish communities harbouring armed resistance, the military has retaliated with full-scale attacks on AA-controlled and contested areas by air, land and water while cutting off transit routes, communication channels and access to medical care for entire populations.
Hundreds of civilians have been injured or lost their lives and more than 185,000 people displaced across Rakhine State and Paletwa since November out of more than three million that the United Nations says have been displaced across the country, mostly as a result of the coup.
Through its forced conscription of Rohingya men as well as by demanding they protest against the AA, the military is also deliberately working to threaten years of fragile progress towards reconciliation between Rakhine and Rohingya communities, according to Simbulan, the conflict sensitivity specialist.
“The military is once again resorting to stirring up communal tensions because it is desperately losing ground in Rakhine,” she said. “As the expected de facto authority in Rakhine, the AA needs to heed its own words that this is a military tactic to divide communities, and not fall into the trap the military has set.”
Fear of conscription
Zubair, in Maungdaw, said that the conflict and military conscription drive left him feeling like the military was attempting to “destroy our Rohingya youth … from every angle”.
Since November, he has repeatedly been forced to flee his home due to the conflict. “Our village was attacked a lot, so we moved to another village which was less attacked,” he said. By February, he was also running from military conscription. Human Rights Watch reported in April that the military had used methods including false offers of citizenship, nighttime raids and abduction at gunpoint to conscript at least 1,000 Rohingya men, some of whom it sent to fight on the front lines against the AA.
In Maungdaw, Zubair said he had been unable to sleep since military soldiers took his neighbours from their home one night in March because he was fearful he might be next. The military was also blocking the roads between villages, leaving him and other young people with few places to go. “We ran inside the village,” said Zubair. “When we heard that [soldiers] were coming from one direction, we ran in another.”
Then, the military ordered the Maungdaw hospital to close, leaving Zubair’s father, who needs to use an inhaler because of a respiratory disease, unable to access medical care.
By April, heavy fighting between the military and AA had reached Rakhine State’s northern townships, alongside a series of devastating arson attacks across neighbouring Buthidaung township whose perpetrator remains disputed.
With a fight for control over Maungdaw looming, Zubair and his parents sneaked across the Naf river into Bangladesh one night at the end of May.
Now staying in the world’s largest refugee camp, Zubair rarely leaves his shelter, fearing that he could be robbed by other camp residents or arrested by Bangladeshi police, who sent back more than 300 people between February and April, according to the research and advocacy group Fortify Rights.
“I need to be cautious every time I go outside,” he told Al Jazeera.
After escaping to nearby villages, Thura Maung, the Rakhine youth, also left the state due to the conflict. On February 9, he travelled by boat for two days to the state capital of Sittwe, and then boarded a plane bound for Myanmar’s largest city of Yangon.
He landed to find a city in chaos. While he was in transit, the military had announced plans to activate conscription from April, prompting a mass exodus from areas under its control. Thura Maung, who had planned to enrol in language classes in Yangon, could not find a course accepting new students and also feared conscription himself. So a week later, he began the trip back to Myebon, which had just been captured by the AA.
As soon as his flight touched down in Sittwe, however, he was arrested at the airport along with the other passengers on his flight. Held without charge at a Buddhist religious centre, military soldiers took his mugshot, interrogated him and searched through his phone.
He is among hundreds of people who have been detained by the military while travelling to or within Rakhine State since February. In March, the military also ordered travel agents and bus operators to stop issuing tickets to Rakhine State natives.
While these actions may have been intended to stop the flow of information and recruits to the AA, for Thura Maung, they had the opposite effect. Nearly a week after he was arrested, he sneaked away and headed towards an AA camp. “I felt lost,” he said. “I attempted to enter the AA without letting my parents know, because I thought it was the only certain thing I could do.”
A relative talked him out of it, however; now back in Myebon, where he is safe from military conscription because the AA controls the town, he still fears he could become the next victim of the military’s attacks. “I feel safer living in Myebon, but I still have to worry about air strikes,” he said.
‘Survival is my priority’
Tun Tun Win, a 24-year-old ethnic Rakhine, was also arrested at Sittwe airport. He had been attending language classes in Yangon when fighting broke out between the military and AA; although he had initially stayed in the city, he changed his plans in February. “Although there is ongoing conflict in Rakhine, I felt more secure living with my family than living alone in Yangon under the conscription law,” he said.
Fleeing one danger, however, he was soon caught up in another. Like Thura Maung, soldiers took him away at the airport and interrogated him for several days at a Buddhist religious centre before he managed to sneak away. Now back home in Myebon, he faces a new set of struggles. “Currently, survival has become my priority rather than pursuing my ambition and plans,” he said.
Arkar Htet, a 27-year-old ethnic Rakhine from a village on the outskirts of Sittwe, also saw his plans fall apart after the conflict broke out. He was running an online delivery service and working as a dance instructor but stopped both after the military imposed a nighttime curfew and stepped up its surveillance and arrests. “I feared going outside even in the afternoon,” he said.
But even at home, he did not feel safe. As the military and AA battled for control over the town of Pauktaw, 30 kilometres (19 miles) northeast, military shells whizzed over his roof, as well as jet fighters on their way to bomb the town.
🔥 Destruction of Pauktaw township
☑️ Pauktaw, Rakhine
☑️ 20.178313, 93.071148Animation by Myanmar Witness shows difference between two dates, (25 Apr 2021 and 5 Jan 2024).#Myanmar
#OSINT pic.twitter.com/H8CO6ShVhZ— Myanmar Witness (@MyanmarWitness) March 12, 2024
By January, the AA controlled Pauktaw, but the military had burned most of it down. As the fighting shifted to areas around Sittwe, Arkar Htet and his family fled by boat on February 29. Stray fire injured a passenger on the way; back in the city, about a dozen people died when shelling hit a portside market.
Arkar Htet and his family managed to reach a village under the AA’s control in Ponnagyun township, and in early April, he told Al Jazeera that he felt “70 percent safe”.
Less than two months later, on May 29 and 30, the military raided Byaing Phyu village, just a few kilometres from the village from which Arkar Htet had fled. According to the AA, military forces killed 72 civilians and raped three women; the military has denied the claims.
Then on June 1, the military bombed a village in Ponnagyun township next to the one where Arkar Htet had taken shelter, killing two civilians. Al Jazeera has been unable to get in touch with him since.
World
AI helped a musician with Parkinson’s finish his new album when he could no longer play guitar
LONDON (AP) — Samuel Smith spent years writing songs with a guitar in his hands.
Now, the London-based singer-songwriter is using artificial intelligence tools to help him continue making Americana music after Parkinson’s disease largely took away his ability to play guitar.
Smith, who was diagnosed with the progressive neurological disorder in 2020, recently released his second album, “The Art of Letting Go.” For one of the eight tracks, an instrumental piece titled “Horizon,” he relied on platforms that use AI to generate music to create demo arrangements that would convey his vision to the musicians who recorded the song.
The demos he created by humming rough melodies into his phone and uploading the recordings into song generators like Suno and Udio weren’t for mixing into the final studio version of “Horizon,” Smith stressed. But tremors, stiffness and fatigue, which are common symptoms of Parkinson’s, caused his guitar skills to deteriorate during the more than a year he worked on the album, he said.
“So then I’m faced with a question,” Smith, 49, said. “‘Don’t play, don’t be creative, or find a way out, find a route.’ And for me, this was the route.”
Generative AI has divided the music industry, whose artists and record labels have complained of their copyrighted work being used to train the models behind AI-powered music tools. Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, although Universal later reached a settlement and partnership deal with Udio and Warner did the same with Suno.
Less discussed is what those platforms can do when employed by a serious musician like Smith, whose disease affects the tools central to his songwriting and identity as a guitarist: his hands. He released his debut album, “In the Springtime,” in 2023, saying he wanted to give his two sons a way to remember when he could perform and record music himself.
“I’d always written, I’d also played, I always sung,” he said. “And immediately it became clear to me that I was in trouble, that my music was going to be seriously compromised.”
From prompts to convincing demos
AI music generators use systems trained on large datasets of recorded music and audio. The platforms analyze patterns in melody, harmony, and rhythm before generating new audio based on prompts or uploaded recordings. Users don’t need musical talent to end up with a serviceable song, or even a popular one.
Smith said producing convincing demos from the synthetic tracks the apps generated often required “50, 100, 150 attempts” and extensive editing “to get something that sounds close to my music.” After humming a song into his phone and uploading the recording, he gives prompts describing instrumentation, mood and style. .
“AI is not replacing anything for me,” he said. “It’s unlocking, it’s enabling. It’s allowing me to keep writing. I upload my lyrics; AI doesn’t create my lyrics. I upload my music; AI does not create my music.”
He added: “It then brings it to life in a way that I can play to session players and say, ‘Here, that’s what I’m thinking, that is what I’m hearing.’”
A bittersweet guitar duet
The album was produced by Grammy-winning pianist and producer Matt Rollings, who assembled a group of established roots and bluegrass musicians for the project. They included dobro player and 16-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas, Grammy-winning banjo player Alison Brown, fiddler Stuart Duncan, guitarist Bryan Sutton, bassist Viktor Krauss and singers Jonatha Brooke and Glen Phillips.
For Smith, the experience of singing in a Nashville studio alongside musicians he had admired for decades was “an extraordinary moment.”
Grammy-nominated guitarist Julian Lage, known for his jazz and acoustic recordings with Blue Note Records, performed on the album’s title track and on “Horizon.” The latter recording became a bittersweet high point in Smith’s career; despite the progression of his disease, he managed to play a guitar duet with his friend.
“I hadn’t been able to play for months, but I kept telling myself that if I wrote something to take to the studio, perhaps the clouds would part for a few minutes,” Smith said. “That’s what happened. I had a window of about 10 minutes in the studio when my arm freed up. … So in the end, I was able to capture the last breath of my guitar playing.”
New possibilities and perils
Experts said AI-assisted music tools could benefit other people with disabilities or illnesses.
Ruaidhri Mannion, a composer, music producer and sonic artist who teaches at Brunel University of London, said technology like affordable digital recording software “effectively democratized the making of music” in recent decades. By helping songwriters and musicians communicate ideas and collaborate more easily, AI tools that generate polished-sounding material from voice or text prompts could work in the same way, he said.
“If these tools are able to enable people to be able to participate with other creative groups and encourage more people to feel confident to be able to reach out to an ensemble or an orchestra or something, then I think that is all for the better,” Mannion said.
But an overreliance on technology could intefere with the trial and error, frustration and synergy that are necessary parts of a musician’s artistic development, Mannion said.
“What makes a lot of music-making meaningful is the collaborative element,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation and development and failure that’s part of musical discovery.”
Udio and Suno have denied copyright infringement allegations and said they wanted to work with the music industry, not in opposition to it. Some musicians are unconvinced. A group of recording artists and activists, including singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and ECR Music Group President Blake Morgan, published an open letter in February under the heading “So no to Suno.”
“Many in our community are embracing responsible AI as a tool for creation, and as a means for fans to explore and interact with our artistry. That’s wonderful,” the letter read. “But it’s not the same as creating an environment where AI-generated works sourced from our music are mass distributed to dilute our royalties or, worse yet, reward those actively seeking to commit fraud. Artists need to know the difference.”
‘Show us what you can do’
Smith said he thinks his experience demonstrated how AI could benefit society and expand creative access, if it’s developed responsibly.
“My message would be that if these companies want to show they’ve got a place, a role in society, then step up,” Smith said. “Engage with health professionals, engage with music therapists, engage with society and show us what you can do.”
On May 21, Smith collaborated with the Berklee Music and Health Institute for an event in New York that brought together music industry leaders, researchers and clinicians to examine how music can support people living with neurological conditions. Smith discussed his experience living with Parkinson’s and sang again alongside musicians who played on “The Art of Letting Go.”
Creating music is crucial to the legacy Smith hopes to leave for his children, ages 4 and 17.
“My 4-year-old is probably never going to remember me playing, and it’s heartbreaking,” he said. “But I’ve been able to pull this into something and refuse to be defined by this disease.”
World
Christian farming communities under siege as US report names Fulani militants Nigeria’s deadliest threat
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JOHANNESBURG — An estimated 30,000 mostly Muslim Fulani militants are operating in Nigeria, causing “worsening insecurity and religious freedom violations,” according to an influential new report.
The report, by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), states “violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year, as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs.”
The Fulanis, so-called herders of livestock, have, according to the USCIRF report, “targeted Christian (farming) communities in the Middle Belt and, increasingly, the South, burning homes and churches as well as kidnapping, raping, and murdering.”
CHRISTIANS TARGETED IN SYSTEMATIC KIDNAPPING CAMPAIGN IN NIGERIA BY JIHADI HERDSMEN, EXPERTS SAY
Funerals were held for about 27 Christians reportedly killed by Islamist Fulani tribesmen in Bindi village, Plateau State, Nigeria, on July 28, 2025. (Christian Solidarity International)
But a former counterterrorism expert at the State Department told Fox News Digital that the kind of strikes the U.S., working with Nigerian government forces, have recently carried out in Nigeria’s North against Islamist terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, wouldn’t work against the Fulanis in the predominantly Christian central areas of the country.
Sterling Tilley, former acting director within the Bureau of Counterterrorism, who has worked in Nigeria for the State Department, said that the U.S. “militarily dealing with the farmer-herder conflict is not advisable because it is likely to bring more instability in the country.” Tilley, now director of the Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellowship at Howard University, added, “There are some steps that can be taken to quell the violence, but there must be Nigerian political will to do so.”
Young people protest against the killings following a deadly attack by Fulani militants on Christian-majority villages in Benue state, that left 218 people dead and 6,000 displaced. The protest took place in Benue state in June 2025. (Open Doors UK)
This week, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth commented on the recent strikes ordered by President Donald Trump on Nigeria, saying, “Maybe a year ago, [the president] heard the call of Nigerian Christians who were being targeted and killed by ISIS. And he said, ‘Pete, I want the War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians.’”
NIGERIA NAMED EPICENTER OF GLOBAL KILLINGS OF CHRISTIANS OVER FAITH IN 2025, REPORT SAYS
Christians make up approximately 48% of Nigeria’s population. Fulani militants, the USCIRF report stated, “have often carried out operations during Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter to further maximize the psychological impact, terrifying those communities from gathering to celebrate or worship. During attacks, assailants sometimes utter slogans with religious connotations, such as “Allahu Akbar“ (Arabic for “God is great”).
But, according to the report, Muslims are being attacked too. “Fulani assailants have not spared Muslims, raiding herders’ cattle and violently attacking non-Fulani Muslim communities,” the report added.
Coffins arrive at Ibrahim Babanginda Square in Makurdi, Benue State, on Jan. 11, 2018, during a funeral service for victims of clashes between Fulani herdsmen and natives of Guma and Logo districts. (Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP)
“Violence at the hands of militants from the Fulani tribe far outnumbers violence from all other militant groups such as Boko Haram or ISWAP (Islamic State West African Province),” Henrietta Blyth, CEO of Open Doors UK & Ireland, an organization that highlights the persecution of Christians, told Fox News Digital.
While her organization was not part of the report, she said, “My heart has been broken as I have heard stories from women and men who have seen their beloved family members butchered in front of them or carried off into a life of slavery.”
AFRICAN UNION CHIEF DENIES GENOCIDE CLAIMS AGAINST CHRISTIANS AS CRUZ WARNS NIGERIAN OFFICIALS
Fulani Muslim men pray in Masallacin Shehu Mosque, Sokoto, Sokoto State, Nigeria, on April 24, 2019. (Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images)
Blyth added: “The situation is complicated, and as the report concludes, it is too simplistic to say all perpetrators are religiously motivated. What is undisputable is that Christians are highly vulnerable and often the victims, paying the price in blood. They desperately need protection and, for hundreds of thousands driven from their homes, the chance to heal and rebuild their lives.”
The USCIRF report also stated, “Criticism of responses to Fulani militant violence from federal and state authorities has often described their responses as unsatisfactory at best and complicit at worst.”
Tilley told Fox News Digital that elections are to be held in Nigeria next year, and “the Fulani do have considerable political influence as a voting bloc. Thus, the Nigerian government seems reluctant to take actions necessary to quell the violence for fear that they could lose their base of support in the North and Middle Belt.”
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Fox News Digital reached out to the Nigerian government for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Published on
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia may be preparing to launch a “massive” new attack against Ukraine.
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“We have intel indicating that Russia is preparing a new massive attack,” Zelenskyy said in a post on social media late on Friday, while also advising people to listen out for air raid alerts and keep safe.
“The air force and protectors of our skies will be working around the clock, as always,” he added.
It comes after Russia deployed its nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile in a massive wave of strikes on the Kyiv region last weekend. Ukraine said the attack included 90 missiles and 600 drones.
The use of the Oreshnik, an intermediate-range ballistic missile that Russia first used in a strike on Dnipro in 2024, drew strong criticism from leaders across Europe.
On Friday, Zelenskyy also reiterated his call for more Patriot missile systems from the US. The Patriot is an air and missile defense system used to intercept ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and aircraft.
Zelenskyy told reporters in Sweden on Thursday that he was being “very persistent” in his pursuit of new missiles for the system. He reportedly wrote to US President Donald Trump earlier this week asking for more ammunition.
“For us — for a nation fighting for its survival — there is hardly anything more painful to see than Patriot batteries with no missiles loaded,” he said in his letter to Trump.
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