Ko Naing* is just the sort of young man Myanmar’s military is looking for.
Hoping to make up for recruitment shortfalls and battlefield losses against armed groups fighting to reverse its 2021 coup, Myanmar’s military last month announced plans to enforce a years-old conscription law.
Starting in April, the military says, all men aged 18 to 35 years and women from 18 to 27 years must serve at least two years in the armed forces.

Doctors and other professionals in especially short supply in the military’s ranks may be drafted until they are 45 years old. The country’s military rulers hope to call up approximately 60,000 recruits by the end of the year.

As a doctor, and at a healthy 33 years old, Ko Naing fits the bill for conscription.

Like many of Myanmar’s young men and women, Ko Naing said he had no intention of answering the call and would instead do whatever it takes to avoid the draft.

“The one sure thing is I won’t serve. If I’m drafted by the military, I will try to move to the remote areas or to another country,” Ko Naing told Al Jazeera from Myanmar.

“Not only me, I think everyone in Myanmar is not willing to serve in the military under the conscription law,” he said. “The people believe it is not legal because the people believe the military is not their government.”

The 2021 coup that removed the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi has plunged Myanmar into a brutal civil war pitting the military against a patchwork of deep-rooted, well-armed ethnic minority armies and a new crop of local armed groups set up to remove the military regime from power.