Myanmar: Junta Increases Attacks on Civilians Using Paramotors and Gyrocopters

Spike in bombings from paramotors and gyrocopters marks deadly shift toward low-cost aerial attacks across Myanmar’s central lowlands

(BANGKOK, January 26, 2026)—The Myanmar military junta is increasingly carrying out targeted attacks on civilians using commercial paramotors and gyrocopters, Fortify Rights said today. Beginning with an attack in Mandalay Region in December 2024, the military has repeatedly used paramotors and gyrocopters to bomb peaceful gatherings and protected civilian sites—schools, hospitals, monasteries, and houses—across Myanmar’s central lowlands in Sagaing, Magway, Mandalay, Ayeyarwady, and Bago regions.

During one particularly deadly attack on October 6, 2025, a paramotor dropped several bombs on a peaceful candle-lighting gathering of some 100 people simultaneously celebrating Thadingyut—the end of the Buddhist lent—and protesting the upcoming elections, killing at least 24 civilians.

“The Myanmar military has found new ways to kill civilians from the sky using paramotors and gyrocopters equipped with operator-released, unguided explosives,” said Chit Seng, Human Rights Associate at Fortify Rights. “As Myanmar faces a fifth year under the junta’s rule, governments must urgently sanction the transfer of weapons, aviation fuel, and dual-use technologies to Myanmar—including the components used to assemble paramotors and gyrocopters.” 

The pattern of attacks has intensified in parallel with the junta’s efforts to consolidate control over central Myanmar, intimidate civilians, and assert authority ahead of its multi-phase sham elections, which began on December 28, 2025, and are continuing until January 25, 2026.

To carry out these attacks, the Myanmar junta is increasingly relying on paramotors—lightweight paragliders equipped with a backpack-mounted engine and propeller or a small wheeled frame holding the motor and propellor—and gyrocopters—small, one- to two-person helicopter-like aircraft with a rotary-wing. These ultralight machines allow for slow, relatively inexpensive, low-altitude manned flights. Some paramotors are believed to be domestically assembled. Although the munitions dropped by the operators are unguided, the low-altitude flights allow these aircraft to attack targets with relative precision.
 
Between October 2025 and January 2026, Fortify Rights interviewed 15 people with direct knowledge of these attacks, including survivors, witnesses, community-based responders, resistance members, and former military personnel from the Myanmar junta Air Force. Fortify Rights also collected and analyzed data on the number of strikes using paramotors and gyrocopters to independently assess the pattern, scale, and trends of the attacks, drawing on open-source reporting and social media posts as well as National Unity Government (NUG) data from December 2024 to December 2025.

Fortify Rights collected data on 304 incidents of paramotor and gyrocopter attacks on civilians between December 2024 and January 11, 2026. In 2025, the data shows a general rise in attacks throughout the year, with notable peaks in April, August, October, and December. The data suggests increases in attacks starting in July and ahead of the junta’s August 18 announcement of the sham elections, as well as a steep escalation in the weeks before the first round of elections held on December 28, 2025.

On January 4, 2026, at approximately 2:30 p.m.—ten days after the junta announced the third phase election in the area—a junta gyrocopter attacked a hospital in Ma Taunt Ta village, Salingyi Township, Sagaing Region. Medical professionals who participated in Myanmar’s peaceful anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) run the hospital, which is located in a township heavily contested by junta and resistance forces. The attack killed the hospital’s 40-year-old chief physician—Dr. Aung Thel Htut—and two other hospital staff, whose identities could not be independently confirmed.

Fortify Rights spoke to a community leader from Ma Taunt Ta village, who knew the chief physician of the hospital and described him as “a well-respected CDM doctor” who “had been stationed at this hospital since the coup.” He went on to say that this was not the first time the military junta attacked this hospital. “The hospital hosts many CDM doctors and nurses … In 2025, the military also dropped a bomb with a paramotor on the road in front of the hospital,” he said.

The next day, on January 5, at approximately 2 p.m., a gyrocopter bombed the cemetery in Kone village, Yinmarbin Township in Sagaing Region, where the deceased chief physician was due to be buried. Due to a delay in the arrival of the funeral procession, none of the mourners were at the cemetery at the time of the attack.

In one of the deadliest such attacks in Sagaing Region, on October 6, 2025, a paramotor dropped two bombs on anti-election protesters and other residents attending a sit-in candlelight vigil marking Thadingyut. The combined vigil and protest were taking place in a school compound in Bon To village, Chaung-U Township in Sagaing Region, and survivors confirmed that there was no active fighting and no military targets in the immediate area.

“Gus,” a 35-year-old organizer of the vigil, said the paramotors were undetectable before bombs suddenly dropped:

Gus told Fortify Rights that they received initial alerts of an incoming paramotor attack, but before further updates could be given, “the phone lines went dead, the walkie-talkies … got jammed,” disrupting immediate evacuation efforts. The paramotor bombing killed at least 24 people, including children, and injured 61. Hours later, at around 11 p.m., another paramotor attack happened at the same site, but did not cause any casualties because the attendees had fled the area.

“The junta thought we would be performing first aid for the injured,” Ko Zwe, another vigil organizer, speculated. “They came to bomb again to completely wipe us out.”

The tactic of carrying out an attack, then deliberately following up with a second strike on the same location after a short time to target first responders and others gathered at the scene, is called a “double-tap strike” and may amount to a war crime.

Fortify Rights also documented multiple incidents of the Myanmar military junta using paramotors to drop bombs on schools, religious sites, and other protected objects. For example, on October 19, 2025, two paramotors dropped three bombs on a monastery in Htan Pu village in Salingyi Township, Sagaing Region, killing a 20-year-old man and injuring three others. Describing the potential for higher civilian casualties, the monastery’s presiding monk told Fortify Rights: “Civilians occasionally come to take refuge [in the monastery] during times when military columns are moving through the area. Sometimes, there can be around 300 or 400 people [in the monastery].”

“We see the military bombing whatever they find,” a resistance member involved in rescue operations in Magway and Sagaing regions told Fortify Rights. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a school or anything else. Whoever gets hit, gets hit. They bomb almost every other day.”

Fortify Rights’s analysis of open-source data, including real-time alerts about Myanmar junta Air Force operations, suggests that junta gyrocopter and paramotor attacks have been geographically clustered around what is known as the central lowlands in Myanmar—Sagaing, Magway, Mandalay, Ayeyarwady, and Bago regions—where largely flat terrain enables low-altitude flight. The military junta mainly carries out such attacks in opposition-held areas where armed opposition groups are not present, or lack effective aerial defense capabilities, as these low-flying and slow crafts are extremely vulnerable to anti-aircraft defenses and small arms fire. This further demonstrates that the paramotor and gyrocopter attacks are directed at unarmed civilians, constituting a war crime.
 
The data reflects an increase in alerts in the months preceding the military junta’s announcement of elections in August and spikes in October and again in December. The highest number of alerts took place in December, ahead of the first round of elections on December 28, 2025.
 
Describing the advantages of using paramotors and gyrocopters, former junta Air Force personnel told Fortify Rights: “For long-term warfare, these are low-cost, effective, and fast to deploy. The main requirement is just the person, and they don’t need a highly trained pilot. An aircraft costs millions of dollars. A paramotor … costs about as much as a single aircraft tire.”
 
Continuing, he said:

The aircraft’s size, low and regular gasoline fuel requirements, and ability to take off from open fields or military compounds allow the Myanmar military junta to conduct attacks without extensive air force infrastructure. With a flight capacity of up to three hours, paramotors and gyrocopters allow the military to sustain operations over target areas while remaining difficult to detect. Their use also allows the Myanmar junta military to bypass jet fuel sanctions currently in place against the junta, and other sanctions, as they require non-sanctioned engine components and simple GPS navigation devices.

International humanitarian law—also known as the laws of war—applies in instances of armed conflict, both of an international and non-international nature and aims to protect civilians and other non-combatants and mitigate the humanitarian impact of war. Despite junta efforts to present a picture of normality through their fraudulent elections, much of Myanmar is in a state of non-international armed conflict where the laws of war apply to all conflicting parties, including junta forces. Under international humanitarian law, armed actors must distinguish, at all times, between civilians and combatants, as well as between civilian objects and military targets. Both direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate strikes that fail to distinguish between civilian and military targets or that strike protected sites, such as schools, hospitals, and religious buildings, are prohibited and may constitute grave breaches of international humanitarian law–also known as war crimes.

U.N. member states must strictly enforce existing sanctions against the Myanmar military junta and issue new sanctions that effectively prohibit the sale or transfer of arms, jet fuel, and dual-use equipment or technologies, Fortify Rights said.

“The junta is working overtime to attract legitimacy from the international community, while adapting its terror campaign against civilians using ever more lethal methods and tactics,” said Chit Seng. “Five years on from their brutal attempted coup, the junta has not stopped committing atrocities. These crimes will not stop without effective and coordinated international intervention.”