More than 3.5 million people have been displaced by armed conflict in Myanmar, an increase of 1.5 million from last year, the United Nations said Friday, warning that the country’s humanitarian crisis could worsen.
Since the military seized power in a 2021 coup, Myanmar has been rocked by fighting between numerous ethnic rebel groups and the army.
Those groups have battled the military since independence for autonomy and control of lucrative natural resources.
The conflict has spread from the borderlands to most regions nationwide, “forcing record numbers of people to flee their homes in search of safety and meeting their basic needs,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said in a statement.
As of December 16, “it is estimated that over 3.5 million people – more than six percent of the total population of 57 million – across Myanmar are now displaced, approximately one-third of them children,” OCHA said.
“This marks a staggering increase of nearly 1.5 million internally displaced persons compared to a year ago.”
The agency said that the final days of 2024 had been marked by “intense fighting involving air strikes, drone attacks, artillery shelling, raids, and arbitrary arrests.”
It called the outlook for 2025 “grim,” citing “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis fueled by escalating conflict, disasters, epidemics, widespread explosive ordnance and land mine contamination, and economic collapse.”
“If these trends persist, the humanitarian situation will deteriorate further, leaving millions of people in urgent need of assistance,” OCHA warned.
The United Nations estimates that 19.9 million people in Myanmar, or more than a third of the population, will need humanitarian aid in 2025.
OCHA has launched an appeal for $1.1 billion in funding to reach 5.5 million people with “life-saving assistance” in 2025, but such appeals are chronically underfunded.
