Like I know there is a Junta and Miltary dictatorship, but when I go into Wikipedia, the war itself looks more complicated that the Syrian civil war
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Myanmar didn’t have a central government until the 50’s and since then the central government has never really exercised full control over the country.
At a very broad level, the country has two ethnic groups: Buddhist South East Asians that occupy the entire country and Muslim Indians who are concentrated along the western border. In general, the Buddhists and Muslims both want to genocide the other.
But within the overall Buddhist South East Asian category there are over a dozen distinct ethnic groups, of which the Burmese make up about 2/3 of the country, largely concentrated along the rivers and delta in the central and south part of the country. The north and east of the country are populated by other ethnic groups, such as Shah and Chinese.
While the Buddhist South East Asians all generally agree that they don’t like the Muslim Indians, that doesn’t mean that they like the other Buddhist South East Asians. Every ethnic group in the country more or less hates the Burmese, who themselves are, at best, indifferent to the other groups.
As far as the Buddhist South East Asians are concerned, the country goes through periods where the ethnically Burmese central government allows the other ethnicities’ local governments in the North and West of the country a lot of autonomy and those areas are relatively peaceful. It also goes through period where the central government tries to exert more authority over those local governments, at which point the country erupts into a civil war.
The current civil war is particularly involved because in 2021 the central government tried to get rid of all of the local autonomous governments, so dozens of different ethnic groups rose up, each of which is confined to a relatively small part of the country.
Those ethnic groups are very loosely aligned in the sense that they don’t like the central government, but they also don’t like each other as well. They’re all fighting to create small ethnostates in their respective regions of operation. The result of this is a mess of dozens of different armed groups, each of which has different goals and their own tiny area of operations.
But to sum it up: the military controlled central government is fighting to impose an ethnically Burmese dominated government on the entire country. Every other ethnicity in the country is fighting that military controlled government to create their own ethnostate or, in the alternative, their own autonomous zone within a a country controlled by a weak central government.
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