Myo Zaw and his team of volunteer rescue workers were the first to arrive at the site where a three-story house had collapsed in Mandalay, a little after 8 p.m. on Saturday. They were digging through the rubble with their bare hands when they heard the voice of a girl.
It was faint but clear. “Help me, I’m here,” she said.
It took them three or four hours to pull out the 12-year-old, who had survived despite the house toppling around her. But in the early hours of Sunday morning, there was only silence as the rescuers continued to work in nearly 100-degree heat. They eventually unearthed three bodies: the girl’s mother and her grandparents.
“Sadly, I fear we will find more bodies than survivors,” Mr. Myo Zaw said. “The heat in Mandalay is intense, causing rapid decomposition. In some cases, we locate the bodies only because of the smell.”
Time is running short in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city with about 1.5 million people, which is near the epicenter of Friday’s devastating earthquake. In one neighborhood in Mandalay, countless buildings were reduced to rubble, satellite images showed.
Across the country, over 1,600 people were confirmed dead, as of Saturday night, and over 3,000 injured in the worst earthquake to hit Myanmar in more than a century. Many fear that the number of people who can be rescued will dwindle after Monday evening, the crucial 72-hour mark after which experts say the chances of survival drop sharply.
Even as volunteer rescuers scoured the ruins of homes, monasteries and mosques, and hospitals overflowed with patients, aftershocks — including a strong one on Sunday — kept residents on edge. Several buildings in Mandalay that had survived Friday’s powerful earthquake toppled on Sunday.
And the military made clear it would not stop a brutal bombing campaign in a civil war that has ravaged the country despite the urgent need for relief efforts, with reports of an airstrike on Sunday afternoon in Pakokku Township in Magway Region in the country’s northwest that killed two women and injured seven others.
How the military government and its commander in chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, an already deeply unpopular leader who ousted a civilian government four years ago, responds in the coming days and weeks could determine the junta’s hold on power. The military government has already lost ground to rebels in the civil war, which had left nearly 20 million of the country’s roughly 54 million people in need of shelter and food even before the quake, according to U.N. officials.
In the early hours after the earthquake, a lack of machinery and personnel severely hampered rescue operations. But the arrival of Chinese rescue teams with heavy equipment on Saturday night has given volunteers a glimmer of hope.
On Sunday, volunteers rescued 29 people from a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay and recovered eight bodies, according to Soe Paing, a rescue worker from the Myanmar fire service department. He said the help from the Chinese had sped up the work.
“Right now, we believe around 90 people are still trapped inside,” he said, “and we are doing everything we can to get them out alive.”
Later in the day, an aftershock struck Mandalay, sending residents into the streets, screaming in fear.
Many are confronting an uncertain future, rationing food, and wondering how they can get by without any power and scarce water. Volunteers asked for more body bags for the corpses that they are pulling out by the hour. Many have said that the army has done little to help.
Aid from other countries has also begun arriving, but questions remain about how the Myanmar army would distribute the much-needed relief. At least half a dozen nations, including India, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore and Thailand, have sent teams and supplies. Some of the aid, such as a group from Singapore as well as supplies from India, has gone to Naypyidaw, the capital, where the military’s generals live and which was less affected than Mandalay.
“They have a long track record of using aid as a weapon,” said Scot Marciel, the U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from 2016 to 2020, said of the military government. “I would think that they would try to use it to funnel aid to their supporters and prevent it from getting to people in the areas controlled by the resistance. I don’t have faith in them that they would do the right thing.”
Padoh Saw Taw Nee, the spokesman for the rebel Karen National Union, said the group welcomed the support of foreign countries but warned them to be “aware of the nature of the military in our country.”
He pointed out that the military had not refrained from attacks even after the earthquake, saying: “They might use the money for the war. We worry about this issue.”
Control of Myanmar is now divided between the military regime, which governs the urban areas, and the ethnic armies, who hold the borderlands. Since the 2021 coup, Sagaing — another region that has been hit hard by the earthquake — has also emerged as a center of resistance and is home to a patchwork of rebel groups. (Internet access has been cut off in Sagaing, making it difficult to get reports from there.)
An hour after Friday’s earthquake, a military paramotor, or motor-powered paraglider, dropped bombs in Chaung Oo village in Sagaing, said Phyu Win, a resident. “People were already terrified from the quake, and with the chaos, it was impossible to take cover in bomb shelters,” she said.
The army’s airplanes have continued to fly overhead since the earthquake. “The junta has no interest in helping people,” Ms. Phyu Win said. “They only want to kill.”
At one point last year, the rebels had advanced close to Mandalay, which was seen by many to be a potential tipping point in the war.
Experts say the earthquake could change the trajectory of the civil war. The National Unity Government, the shadow government in exile, has called for a two-week pause in fighting, but it does not speak for the multiple rebel groups and ethnic armies fighting government forces. The powerful Arakan Army, which has won control of large parts of Rakhine State in Myanmar, could exploit this moment to wrest the south of the country away from the junta.
Much will also depend on how General Min Aung Hlaing and his military view this moment.
“Their backs are to the wall and they can’t cope,” Khin Zaw Win, a political analyst and director of the Tampadipa Institute, a research group in Yangon, said of the military rulers. “We have come to the point where the military will be forced to relent.”
Richard Horsey, a senior adviser on Myanmar for the International Crisis Group, called the earthquake “a moment of jeopardy for Min Aung Hlaing.”
“It’s really a critical moment for him, his legacy, but also his current regime,” Mr. Horsey said. “He doesn’t exactly know how this is going to play out — it’s difficult to guess — but he knows that there will be huge political aftershocks.”
Verena Hölzl contributed reporting from Bangkok.
