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Myanmar The military is increasingly using commercial paramotors and gyroplanes, low-tech aircraft, to expand its ability to attack civilians and rebels from the air as the country’s civil war rages on, according to a report released Monday.
Rights group Fortify Rights said in its report that the military’s use of paramotors, which are essentially paragliders combined with backpack engines with propellers, was first reported in 2024, while the first incident involving a gyrocopter, an ultralight one- or two-person aircraft with helicopter-like rotating blades, was in March last year.
Over the last year, the group has tracked an increasing number of such attacks, in which pilots drop mortar bombs with their hands and paramotors sometimes shut down their engines and glide silently as they finally approach their targets.
“The Myanmar military has found new ways to kill civilians from the air using paramotors and gyroplanes equipped with hand-delivered unguided explosives,” Fortify Rights’ Chit Seng said in a statement.
Attack kills dozens
In the deadliest such attack on record, a paramotor dropped two projectiles on anti-election protesters attending a candlelight vigil in the Sagaing district in October, killing at least 24 people. In another attack in the Sagaing region, a gyroplane attacked a hospital, killing the chief physician and two other hospital staff. Fortify Rights said the reports were supported by interviews with witnesses.
Myanmar’s military did not respond to requests for comment on the findings but has often insisted it does not target civilians.
Military overthrows elected civilian government Aung San Suu Kyi In February 2021, widespread opposition arose and turned into a civil war. Since then, more than 7,700 civilians have been killed, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a watchdog group that tracks arrests, attacks and casualties of political prisoners.
The attacks by both types of aircraft documented by Fortify Rights took place in the lowlands of central Myanmar’s Sagaing, Magwe, Mandalay, Ayeyarwaddy and Bago regions, which have largely flat terrain that allows for low-altitude flights. The report said the attacks occurred mainly in opposition-controlled areas where militias have limited activity or lack air defense capabilities, as slow-moving aircraft are particularly vulnerable.
Still, they add to the Tatmadaw’s aerial arsenal, which also includes modern jets, helicopters and drones.
airplane Provide strategic advantage
Cheap and easy to operate, they can be fired from an open field and can stay airborne for about three hours while carrying 30 to 40 mortar shells, which can be dropped onto ground targets by hand or a rudimentary release mechanism.
“Paramotors are deployed in areas where armed actors have less experience or lack firepower,” said Morgan Michaels, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies who manages the Myanmar Conflict Mapping Project and has tracked a similar increase in paramotor use.
“Then we can infer that they also help relieve pressure on the air force, allowing the Tatmadaw to move more advanced aviation assets to peripheral areas along the border where (anti-government militias) operate,” Michaels, who was not involved in the study on hardening rights, told The Associated Press.
Fortify Rights data, based on open-source reporting and first-hand interviews about the attacks, suggests attacks began to increase in July, just before the junta announced it would hold elections, and surged as the first round of voting began in December. With Suu Kyi’s party banned and the opposition largely silenced, critics say the third and final round of elections, which ended on Sunday, is simply meant to lend a luster of legitimacy to the military’s power.
“The pattern of attacks is intensifying as the junta consolidates control over central Myanmar, terrorizes civilians and asserts authority ahead of multiple stages of sham elections,” Fortify Rights said.
Hundreds of attacks on civilians
Overall, the organization counted 304 paramotor and gyroplane attacks on civilians between December 2024 and January 11, 2026.
In total, Michaels said, there were about 350 incidents involving such aircraft around that time, including attacks on troops, according to the online Armed Conflict Location and Incident Data database, although it listed only about a third of the incidents specifically targeting civilians.
“We know the Tatmadaw attacks civilians and collective punishment has been a key component of its counter-insurgency strategy for decades. There is no dispute about that,” he said.
He added: “However, open source conflict data is not reliable enough to determine what proportion of airstrikes constitute deliberate attacks on civilians and what proportion are airstrikes that target combatants but cause undue harm to civilians.”
Michaels said that although militias from Myanmar’s ethnic minority groups and the pro-democracy People’s Defense Forces have seized large swaths of territory from the army, the fact that paramotors and gyroplanes can be used effectively underscores how poorly equipped many opposition forces remain.
“This shows that the armed forces can still dominate the battlefield in central Myanmar, while opposition groups are unable to protect civilians from deliberate or disproportionate airstrikes,” he said.
Although some countries—especially China and Russia — continue to supply military equipment to Myanmar, and many other countries have imposed sanctions prohibiting such trade.
However, despite the sanctions, amnesty international A separate analysis reported on Monday that aviation fuel continues to enter the country via so-called “ghost ships” that turn off their location tracking systems to avoid detection.
Myanmar’s military junta also did not respond to questions about the Amnesty International report.
Fortify Rights urges governments to reassess sanctions to ensure paramotors and gyroplane parts do not get through.
“UN member states must strictly enforce existing sanctions against Myanmar’s military junta and issue new sanctions that effectively prohibit the sale or transfer of weapons, jet fuel, and dual-use equipment or technology,” Strengthen Rights said.