Silence before the storm in northeast India
There is a particular quality to silence in Upper Assam. It is not the absence of sound: the tea gardens still hum with sickle and static radio, the Brahmaputra still drags its brown weight past Sadiya and Dibrugarh, the Bihu drums have not stopped. It is the absence of incident. For a decade now, the districts that once bled under the shadow of the 28th Battalion (Tinsukia, Sivasagar, Golaghat) have known something close to peace. Militancy, we are told, is a memory. United Liberation Front of Asom — Independent (ULFA-I) is a rump. Its commander has not set foot in his own camps for ten years. The story Assam tells itself is one of insurgency exhausted into irrelevance.
But look east, past the tea estates and the last Assam Rifles checkpoint, into the hills where the state’s writ has never fully reached, and the picture complicates. Myanmar is disintegrating in slow motion. Opium is being cultivated at a scale unseen in a decade. Drones sourced in Kyiv and Warsaw are surfacing in the hands of ethnic armies fighting a junta that no longer controls a fifth of its own country. Foreign nationals with opaque biographies are being intercepted along footpaths on India’s borders with unsettling regularity. And a wartime supply road, closed for eighty years, is suddenly being discussed in Delhi’s strategic circles again, not out of nostalgia but because of what lies buried in the hills it crosses.
None of these threads, on its own, proves very much. Together, they describe a region rearming itself in the dark. This is an attempt to lay them side by side.
The vacuum that made ULFA
To understand why the current moment matters, it helps to remember what happened the last time Myanmar’s north came apart.
The ULFA was born in 1979 out of a genuine and still-unresolved grievance: the sense among Assamese youth that the state’s oil, tea and land wealth flowed outward while unemployment and unchecked migration hollowed out the province from within. But grievance alone does not build a guerrilla army. What transformed ULFA from a students’ union offshoot into one of South Asia’s most capable insurgencies was geography, specifically the porosity of the hills separating Assam from a Myanmar that, through the 1980s, was itself fracturing into ethnic fiefdoms beyond Rangoon's control.
Suppressing insurgency in Assam became an essential element of India’s later “Look East” policy precisely because that insurgency had, from its infancy, been sustained by cross-border sanctuary. ULFA cadres trained with the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Naga underground; camps proliferated across the Indo-Myanmar-Bangladesh-Bhutan quadrilateral faster than any single government could dismantle them. The 28th Battalion, the “Kashmir Camp,” was the most lethal expression of that sanctuary system: a force of more than 500 cadres headquartered not in Assam but deep inside eastern Myanmar, funded by extortion, armed with AK-56s and RPGs, and answerable to a leadership that could retreat across a border the Indian state could not follow.
That entire architecture depended on one condition: that the borderlands of northern Myanmar remain lawless enough to host it, and porous enough to supply it. For 20 years, counter-insurgency operations (Bhutan’s 2003 Operation All Clear, sustained Indian Army pressure, Bangladesh’s post-2009 crackdown under the Awami League) steadily closed those sanctuaries, one by one. By the 2020s, ULFA-I had been reduced to a shadow of the 28th Battalion’s era: a few hundred cadres, an ageing and largely absentee commander-in-chief, and a recruitment base that, by the account of a 2025 defector, no longer even receives ideological instruction.
Which is precisely why what is happening in Myanmar right now should concern anyone who has read this history before.
Myanmar’s second collapse
Five years after the 2021 coup, the Myanmar junta controls barely a fifth of the country’s territory, with more than 5 million people displaced and more than fifteen thousand killed in 2025 alone. The prospect of a unified resistance briefly flickered when the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 tore through northern Shan State in 2023. But by 2025, Chinese pressure had forced the return of captured territory, and in March 2026 the alliance effectively fractured when the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) turned its guns on its former ally the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), seizing the border town of Kutkai in a move analysts read as a realignment toward Beijing.
What has emerged from that fracture is not junta victory but a checkerboard of competing sovereignties. A new coalition, the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union — bringing together the Chin National Front, the KIA, the Karen National Union and the Karenni National Progressive Party with the exiled National Unity Government — was announced in March 2026 as an attempt to unify a resistance that had spent years speaking in “two or three voices.” Meanwhile the junta, unable to win outright, has turned to intensified aerial bombing of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, in a strategy of attrition against the population it cannot govern.
This is, in almost every structural sense, a repeat of the conditions that birthed the 28th Battalion: a weak or absent central authority, ethnic militaries controlling long stretches of the India-facing border, and a war economy that rewards anyone who can move men, money, or matériel through the hills. The difference is scale, and the difference is drones.
The road of ghosts, a haunting trail from World War II
There is a single stretch of asphalt, half-swallowed by jungle for eighty years, that captures this shift better than any troop map — the Stilwell Road. It was built by dying men: US engineers and conscripted labourers hacking through malarial hill country at a rate the US Army itself called the toughest assignment it ever handed its engineers. It has spent most of the decades since as a ghost road, remembered mostly through crashed wartime aircraft still occasionally surfacing from the undergrowth of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and northern Myanmar. That a corridor built to move armies against Japan should now be stirring back to life as a route for rare earths, insurgents and unmarked convoys is the kind of historical irony this region seems condemned to repeat.
Built between 1942–45 under General Joseph Stilwell to resupply Chiang Kai-shek’s forces against Japan, the 1736-kilometre road ran from Ledo in Assam, through Myanmar’s Kachin and Sagaing regions, into China’s Yunnan province. The Indo-Myanmar stretch has been disused since the war ended, and for decades New Delhi kept it that way deliberately: the presence of ethnic insurgents along the route, and the fear that reopening it would simply widen the pipeline for drugs and small arms into the northeast, made the road a strategic liability rather than an asset. As recently as the 2010s, Indian military planners explicitly warned that opening the road “can be adversely used against us during any war with China.”
That calculus is now being revisited, not for trade in the abstract but for what northern Myanmar is sitting on. India has begun holding talks with the KIA, which controls the terrain, over access to rare-earth deposits, including dysprosium and terbium, minerals essential to EV motors, precision munitions, and satellite systems, a trade currently dominated by China. In other words: the same collapse of central authority that makes the road dangerous is what makes it, for the first time in eighty years, accessible: accessible to Indian officials courting the KIA, accessible to Chinese trade networks realigning with the MNDAA, and, by the same physics of an unpatrolled border, accessible to whoever else wants to move through it unseen.
A road that reopens because a state has collapsed is not a peace dividend. It is a symptom.
Golden Triangle and the Manipur conflict
The clearest evidence of what an ungoverned Myanmar produces is agricultural. The United Nation’s 2025 opium survey found that poppy cultivation in Myanmar expanded 17% from the previous year to 53,100 hectares, the largest area under cultivation since 2015, cementing the country’s position, in the wake of the Taliban’s opium ban in Afghanistan, as the world’s leading illicit opium source. The price of a kilogram of raw opium has more than doubled since 2019, rising from $145 to $329, a market signal that draws exactly the kind of capital that fuelled ULFA’s own extortion-and-arms economy a generation ago.
The correlation between conflict and cultivation is not coincidental. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s regional representative has directly linked the intensification of fighting in Shan and other border states to farmers’ return to poppy as one of the few reliable livelihoods left to them. A 2023 UNODC assessment also found indications of substantial opium cultivation in Sagaing, directly along Myanmar’s frontier with India. Shan State’s opiate economy has historically bled sideways into northeast India’s own insurgent financing networks; there is no structural reason to assume that a larger opium economy next door produces a smaller one here.
That money finds a ready market in a region already the most heavily armed in India. Assam and its neighbouring states have always sat at an anomaly in India’s gun-control landscape: even under India’s generally restrictive licensing regime, the northeastern states show markedly higher rates of licensed firearm ownership than most of the country, a pattern rooted in border security concerns, rural land-protection traditions and decades of insurgency. Licensed guns are only the visible fraction of the region’s actual arsenal.
Manipur has spent the past three years demonstrating what the invisible fraction looks like once civil order breaks down entirely. Since ethnic violence erupted in May 2023, roughly 6000 weapons have been looted from police armouries and gun shops by militants on both sides of the conflict, of which only a fraction have been recovered. Nearly a third of the weapons in militant hands were found to be more sophisticated than anything in the state’s own armoury, including assault rifles such as M16s and M4A1 carbines sourced from outside official channels entirely. Manipur is not an isolated ethnic crisis sealed off from the wider northeast; it is a live demonstration of how quickly a state’s monopoly on force can collapse once it slips, and of how readily an under-policed, opium-adjacent frontier supplies the weapons to fill the gap. Layer a resurgent Golden Triangle arms-and-drugs corridor onto a region already holding this concentration of both licensed and looted weapons, and the phrase “civilian rearmament” stops being metaphorical.
Mysterious foreigners
Everything laid out above — the collapsing junta, the record poppy harvest, the reopening ghost road, the looted armouries of Manipur — is scaffolding. It exists to answer one question: why should a handful of border arrests matter at all? The answer lies in timing and geography, and in both, this moment rhymes uncomfortably with the one that produced ULFA in the first place.
Recall the sequence from the 1980s: Myanmar’s north slipping out of Rangoon’s control, ethnic armies consolidating territory along the frontier and, arriving into that vacuum almost precisely as it opened, foreign trainers, arms brokers and sympathetic intermediaries who furnished a fledgling insurgency with tradecraft it did not yet possess. ULFA did not invent guerrilla warfare on its own; it was taught, in camps across a border nobody was watching closely enough. The insurgency that became the 28th Battalion was, in its infancy, a beneficiary of exactly the kind of externally supplied expertise that a lawless borderland makes possible.
Set that history beside what has surfaced in the past four months.
The drone network: On March 13, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested US citizen Matthew Aaron VanDyke (founder of a Washington-based security consultancy that has provided training to non-state fighters in Libya and Ukraine), alongside six Ukrainian nationals at airports in Kolkata, Delhi and Lucknow. The NIA alleges the group entered India on tourist visas, travelled into Mizoram, a Protected Area Permit zone barred to foreign travellers, then crossed into Myanmar without authorisation, where they trained ethnic armed groups and smuggled a large consignment of drones sourced from Europe. This is not an allegation of tourism gone wrong. It is a documented, charge-sheeted case of foreign nationals entering India’s most restricted frontier specifically to deliver modern combat capability to armed groups on the other side.
Investigative reporting has traced the consequences: sources allege one shipment of drones brought down a Myanmar military aircraft, while Kachin rebels separately used drones to damage an ATR-72 at Myitkyina airport in February. In a detail that underlines how contested this borderland has become for outside powers and not just insurgents, Indian authorities were reportedly tipped off to the group’s movements by Russian intelligence, itself monitoring the network amid the wider geopolitical fallout of the Ukraine war. Whatever the full truth of the network’s backers, the operational fact is undisputed: foreign nationals with combat-training expertise used India’s northeast as a transit corridor into a conflict zone, and the ethnic armies they trained are described by the NIA’s own filing as having links to insurgent organisations inside India.
The Nepal border incidents: In July 2026, two more unexplained figures surfaced along a different but equally porous frontier, and, in the retelling, briefly merged into one story they were not. Jordan Brown, a 36-year-old Californian claiming six years’ service in the US Navy and Special Forces, was intercepted by the Sashastra Seema Bal roughly 35 metres inside Indian territory attempting to cross into Nepal near Sonauli. He was carrying no passport, visa or identification, with two mobile phones he had reportedly damaged himself, and whose account of how he entered India has shifted with each retelling, with his claimed military background still unverified by Indian agencies.
Days earlier and roughly 350 kilometres away in Bihar’s East Champaran district, Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) personnel separately arrested Ukrainian national Oksana Shevtsova attempting an identical crossing, after discovering her visa had expired in 2022. On the available facts, an unrelated overstay case, folded into the same “foreign agents” narrative online only because the nationality and the border happened to match. It is worth being precise about that distinction rather than letting the two blur, as they did on social media within hours of the arrests.
Here, then, is the pattern worth sitting with, not a proven conspiracy, which the public record does not support, but a recurrence of conditions. A remote frontier, at the periphery of Indian authority and in the underbelly of Chinese influence, is once again drawing men who move without passports, without a consistent story, and without any plausible tourist’s reason to be near a border crossing. One such case has already been proven, under oath, to involve foreign combat trainers arming ethnic militias with links into India’s own insurgent networks. The others remain unresolved. But the 1980s taught this region what happens when unexplained foreigners start arriving in its remotest hills at the exact moment those hills stop being governed by anyone. It is seldom nothing.
Why ‘silence before the storm’
Here is the genuinely uncomfortable part: ULFA-I itself is not what it was. Its commander-in-chief has not visited his own Myanmar camps in over a decade and is reportedly based in China; ideological training of new recruits has largely ceased; and morale within its remaining bases has collapsed following a series of drone strikes on its Sagaing headquarters. By every conventional metric, the organisation that ran the 28th Battalion is dying.
But an insurgency dying of organisational rot is not the same as a region returning to peace: it is a vacancy. The 1980s taught Assam that vacancies of exactly this kind get filled, and filled quickly, by whoever can supply arms, sanctuary and cash fastest across an unwatched border. What has changed since the 1980s is the sophistication of what is on offer: not just AK-56s smuggled from Kachin armouries, but European-made attack drones capable of downing aircraft; not a slow trickle of opium revenue, but a decade-high poppy economy worth up to two billion dollars; not a handful of foreign trainers slipping in on forged papers, but documented mercenary networks with the operational reach to train ethnic militaries in modern warfare.
Assam is not currently at war. That is the honest, unglamorous truth beneath the alarm. But the ingredients that produced its last war — a collapsing neighbour, an unregulated arms and opium economy, and foreign actors moving unsupervised through its border hills — are all present, in a more advanced form. Whether that adds up to storm or false alarm is not yet knowable. It is, at minimum, no longer a silence worth mistaking for peace.
Maharnav Bhuyan is currently reading for an Executive MA in Strategic Communication Management at Monash University, Australia. He is the principal author of Midnight's Oeuvre and Fabricated Communicative Immortality and is a former journalist and columnist from Assam.
This piece draws on open-source reporting current as of July 2026. Several elements, particularly the VanDyke network investigation and the status of ULFA-I's remaining Myanmar camps, remain active, contested and subject to revision as agencies release further findings.
