While Myanmar’s troops roll around in noisy vehicles, the rebels slink through untamed forests. As in Appalachia or Tibet, high-altitude, impassible terrain fosters cultures that cherish independence. It’s the sort of landscape that imperial governments often try and fail to fully subdue. It is both mountainous and pounded by hard rain for much of the year. In recent months, the strikes have been unrelenting.īut even if the war stopped tomorrow - and it won’t - this place would be difficult to modernize. For decades, Myanmar’s army has shelled Kachin villages and blasted rebel positions with attack choppers. This development void is a casualty of war. Nor is there much electricity or many hospitals and schools. Kachin State, mired in war for much of the past century, is hard to traverse by car. Anything you would normally carry by car.” “They can carry pretty much anything,” says Col. They move stealthily - well, stealthily by elephant standards - along secret jungle routes with cargo on their backs. The KIA’s elephants are purely logistical. The KIA’s elephants lead pretty good lives overall.” The words “war elephant” shouldn’t imply that “the KIA is making these elephants fight and murder,” Shell says. This is the sort of gore and horror conjured by the phrase “war elephant.” But it would be a highly misleading way to imagine the KIA’s tusked cavalry. But when there are no fences to hold it back, and that elephant wants to kill you, its bellows are positively nauseating. Or worse yet, skewered by tusks, sometimes outfitted with metal spikes.īeyond raw power, war elephants also bring psychological terror to the battleground.Ī trumpeting pachyderm may sound majestic at the zoo. Swordsman who tried often got trampled flat.
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Their inch-thick skin is extremely hard to penetrate. This is the creature “used in classical and medieval times to charge an enemy’s front lines,” says Jacob Shell, an assistant geography professor with Temple University who has extensively studied war elephants.Īncient rulers - from Alexander the Great to Egyptian pharaohs - used elephants as organic tanks. The most frightening version is the combat elephant. “In the deep jungle, an elephant is the only way to bring in supplies. James Lum Dau, a foreign affairs specialist who has served in the KIA for decades. Places where cars and trucks cannot go,” says Col. “You’ll mostly find them in remote areas. They rely on mortar shells, rusty assault rifles, 10,000 fighters (including women) and a little-known corps of about four dozen elephants. The KIA defends its native turf against domination by Myanmar’s military.
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They inhabit an area roughly the size of Portugal that is rich with jade, gold and timber.
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Their namesake ethnic group, the Kachin, was Christianized by American missionaries in the 1800s. The KIA are among Asia’s largest guerrilla factions. They are rebels known as the KIA, short for Kachin Independence Army. The upholders of this custom obey no government.
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There, in remote hilltops abutting China, mankind’s 4,000-year-old war elephant tradition is kept alive.
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War elephants trod through a more forbidding patch of the country: the northern Kachin State, where modernity is held back by war. Not central Myanmar, where selfie-snapping tour groups get herded through golden temples. They were exotic cavalry for long-dead empires: Carthage and Macedon, the Mughals and the Khmer.īut there is one corner of the planet - and only one - where war elephants persist into the 21st century. War elephants tend to conjure up Iron Age battles, those archaic campaigns in which hordes dismembered other hordes with arrows and blades. It was the shriek of an elephant, tusks slick with blood, skulls crunching underfoot. There was a time when the most fearsome sound in warfare was not the crack of a rifle or the eerie hum of a drone.