# Kachin Independence Army An ethnic armed organisation of roughly 15,000 fighters in northern Myanmar, the armed wing of the Kachin Independence Organisation — and, since October 2024, the single armed group with the most direct leverage over a global critical-minerals supply chain. ## What it controls **Rare earths.** In **October 2024 the KIA seized Chipwi and Pangwa** in Kachin Special Region 1 from the NDA-K militia, which had run over a hundred mines for Chinese operators. These townships supply roughly half the world's heavy rare-earth feedstock — dysprosium and terbium — essentially all of it to China. The immediate effects were measurable in world markets: China closed the border gates as leverage; terbium rose from about $1,200/kg to over $1,950/kg within weeks; Chinese rare-earth imports from Myanmar fell 89% year-on-year by February 2025. The KIA then did what an armed group with a chokepoint does. It imposed a levy — initially 20% of exported concentrate, settling by April 2025 on a **fixed 35,000 yuan (about $4,830) per tonne** plus an in-kind cut of two tonnes per ten crossing the border. It permitted only previously operating companies and issued no new licences. Potential revenue has been estimated above **$200 million a year**. The KIO's own framing for the pause was "strategic bargaining chips." **Jade.** [[Global Witness]] found jade is the largest single source of income for the KIO. The KIA lost the Hpakant mines after the early-1990s ceasefire, which handed control to Chinese and Burmese firms; it now taxes the flow rather than owning the pits — 20,000 kyat per barrel of fuel entering Hpakant, and again on purchase. Since March 2024 the KIA has taken more than sixty junta outposts across Kachin and encircled Hpakant town, without taking it. See [[Myanmar Conflict Minerals]]. ## Why it matters beyond Myanmar The KIA is being courted. A US embassy official visited Kachin State in August 2025, reportedly avoiding direct engagement; India has approached the group about heavy rare-earth supply. Both approaches run into the same wall. **All the logistics run northeast into Yunnan, and there is no non-Chinese heavy rare-earth separation capacity at scale.** As one analysis put it, the rare-earth contest is not fundamentally about mines — it is about industrial ecosystems. An armed group can hold the ore and still have exactly one customer. That is the same structural trap the [[Democratic Republic of the Congo]] is in with cobalt, and it is why [[Critical Minerals]] policy keeps arriving at refining rather than mining. ## See also [[Myanmar Conflict Minerals]] · [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Rare Earth Elements]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]] · [[China]]