This is the Popular Front podcast with me Jake Hanrahan.

We're focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict

all across the world. Popular Front is completely independent.

Today we're speaking to geospatial analyst Nathan Russo. He's going to be talking to us about how the rebels in Myanmar have turned the

tide of the war fighting the junta specifically in the last six months. Now it looks like

they're actually winning against all odds.

The resistance has managed to take huge areas of land back from the junta,

disarming their soldiers and sending them back to the dwindling government controlled areas.

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I think one of the last times we spoke about Myanmar it was sort of almost

looking like this impossible insurgency to some degree you had people up in the mountains in the jungles

young men leaving the urban environments and teaming up with old resistance groups

and it just seemed like the sort of thing where it was like well good for them but I don't know I kind of felt like this is probably not going to work but now in the last however many months I think the last maybe six months a little bit less

the rebels are actually seemingly winning and things have taken a real big turn

so can you can you maybe just explain to us what has happened?

Yeah I think to some extent from the very start it was clear that this was going to be something different to the

uncertainties that we've seen before and to the sort of protest movements that we've seen before

and within a few months it was sort of

pretty clear that the junta was never going to be able to put this back in the bottle

but that being said it was also clear that neither side really had a way in which they could win this war.

It was obvious to say that the junta was never going to win it, but it was hard to see how the resistance won it as well.

And yeah, what we've seen in the last really eight or nine months since late October last year has been this really nationwide

...