Communities Across Myanmar Taking Up Arms to Resist Junta

BANGKOK - Communities across Myanmar are forming armed bands with mostly crude guns and explosives in an increasingly violent resistance to the military junta that toppled the country’s democratically elected government more than four months ago, raising fears of a sweeping civil war.

Dominated by Myanmar’s ethnic Burman majority, the military has been at war with an evolving cast of ethnic minority armies fighting for autonomy on patches of land along the borders since the country’s independence from Britain in 1948. The Feb. 1 coup has drawn the fighting deeper into the country and pitted the military against ethnic Burmans as well, as peaceful protests against the junta give way to sporadic firefights with police and soldiers, assassinations of suspected junta collaborators and bombings in the face of the military’s bloody crackdown. On the brink