More than 100,000 killed in Myanmar since 2021 coup, monitor says Since a 2021 coup ousted Myanmar's democratically elected government and triggered a civil war, 100,114 people have been killed across the country, according to a report by monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) released Wednesday. More than 100,000 people have been killed across all sides in Myanmar since a military coup five years ago triggered civil war, a conflict monitor said Wednesday. The military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, detaining the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and ending Myanmar's decade-long experiment with democracy.

Anti-putsch protests were put down by security forces, but activists quit the cities to form pro-democracy guerrilla groups, fighting alongside ethnic minority armies which have long resisted central rule. Since the coup there have been 100,114 conflict related fatalities, according to latest data from monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), which tallies media reports of violence. There is no official toll and estimates vary widely, but analysts regard the half-decade civil war as Asia's deadliest active conflict.

"The pain is just endless," said 49-year-old Thein Aye Nu, whose husband was killed in an air strike in the western state of Rakhine last month. "I am so deeply resentful and very angry. But I don't even know who to be angry at anymore.

I just have to console myself by accepting it as fate." Whole-country conflict After the coup, Myanmar was ruled by diktat for five years by military chief Min Aung Hlaing. He retired from the armed forces to take office as civilian president in April after deeply restricted elections blocked by rebels from their territory, and in which Suu Kyi's party was sidelined. Read moreMyanmar’s parliament elects coup-leading general as civilian president Democracy monitors dismissed the vote as a charade to rebrand Min Aung Hlaing's rule and rebels rejected his call for fresh peace talks as an insincere ploy to launder his image abroad.

"If there was no coup, children would be studying at schools," said one man in Myit Chay town in central Magway region, whose teenage son was recently killed. His son died in combat after running away from home to fight for pro-democracy rebels, he said. "We didn't even get a chance to properly chant Buddhist funeral rites.

Heavy artillery was being fired," he said. "He left so many memories – I am not satisfied to do have done so little for him." More than 3.7 million people are internally displaced in Myanmar, according to the United Nations, and more one in five people face acute food insecurity amid a national backslide into poverty. In the largest city, Yangon, violence can take the form of occasional assassinations.

Other places are riven by entrenched warfare or pounded by daily air strikes by the military's Russian- and Chinese-supplied jets. Myanmar was the second most conflict-hit nation in the world last year, according to ACLED, behind only the Palestinian territories. ACLED has registered more than 1,200 distinct armed groups in the civil war, calling it "the most fragmented conflict in the world".