How Iran's shadow fleet is fuelling Myanmar junta's air campaign against civilians

Taken together, the Iranian deliveries to Myanmar's military have helped shift the dynamic of the five-year civil war, which pits the junta against an array of rebel groups, none of whom have a conventional air force or a ready supply of weapons as powerful as the bombs and missiles launched by fighter jets.

The first bomb to strike the remote western Myanmar village of Vanha came from a junta warplane. It hit the only school in the hamlet, near the frontline of Myanmar’s civil war. The second came from a drone minutes later.

On that day, October 13, 2025, an Iranian tanker was headed home from Myanmar, where it had recently unloaded more than 16,000 tons of jet fuel under a cloak of electronic scrambling – enough for thousands more fighter jet sorties.

Illicit Iranian deliveries of jet fuel have powered an expansive bombing campaign by the Myanmar junta that has struck more than 1,000 civilian locations in 15 months, a Reuters investigation has found. Iran has also dispatched cargoes of urea, a key ingredient in the junta’s munitions, including the bombs it drops from drones and paragliders.

Taken together, the Iranian deliveries to Myanmar’s military have helped shift the dynamic of the five-year civil war, which pits the junta against an array of rebel groups, none of whom have a conventional air force or a ready supply of weapons as powerful as the bombs and missiles launched by fighter jets. And for Iran’s embattled government, the trade has brought in new revenue and influence as sanctions tighten and old allies lose power.

By the time the warplane swooped over Vanha and bombed the school, Myanmar’s air force had already received huge quantities of Iranian jet fuel. Two students died that day and 22 people were injured, according to one of the wounded, a man who was in the schoolyard, and Chin Human Rights Organization, which documents junta attacks in the region.

Most of the children were outside cleaning up the yard at the time, the injured man said, or the toll would have been far worse. Vanha’s dead were among at least 1,728 civilians killed in government airstrikes since the Iranian deliveries began, according to data compiled by Burma News International-Myanmar Peace Monitor, which tracks the conflict.