Fight back or flee? Myanmar draft forces hard choices on youth

Weeks after Myanmar's military government announced a nationwide draft, two young women from far-flung parts of the Southeast Asian country headed to the jungles to take up arms against the junta.

For two men in their 30s in Myanmar's two largest cities, the threat of conscription after the February call-up prompted them to upend their lives and flee to neighbouring Thailand.

The choices by these four young people to rebel or flee offer a glimpse into the turmoil in Myanmar as a growing military resistance poses the biggest challenge to the junta since it seized power in a 2021 coup.

Enforcing a 2010 law, the junta said in February all men aged 18 to 35 and women 18 to 27 must serve for up to two years, while specialists like doctors aged up to 45 must serve for three years.

That means 14 million people, 27 per cent of Myanmar's population, are subject to conscription, the junta says, calling on around 60,000 a year to enlist. Estimates of the current size of the armed forces, rebel groups or numbers of people trying to avoid conscription could not be ascertained.

The government is responding to a rebel offencive launched in October that has become the most significant threat to the regime since the coup that toppled Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian-led government.

'I have made my choice'

"After the conscription law was enacted, all young people had to make a decision," said one of the women, an 18-year-old computer science student who left Myanmar's Mon state without telling her mother, to join the armed wing of the Karen National Union rebel group.

"I don't fear battles," she said, "I have made my choice."

In Bangkok, one of the men who fled, a 32-year-old who moved from Mandalay, said, "I was still at my job