'Ghost Tankers' From Iran Ferried Jet Fuel to Myanmar Airforce

Iran has been secretly shipping aviation fuel to Myanmar, which has helped the military regime ramp up bombing raids on civilian targets in the lead-up to its ‘sham’ election.

An investigative report released this week by Amnesty International revealed how Iran has become a key supplier of jet fuel and urea for the junta despite international sanctions.

Tehran has been using tankers that have been deceptive about their true locations, sending fake location signals to ‘trick’ the Automatic Identification System that monitors shipping, as Reuters also reported.

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Amnesty said aviation fuel continues to arrive in Yangon via a murky supply chain that has “gone rogue” five years since the junta prevented Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy from resuming power in February 2021.

The rights group said an analysis of trade, shipping, satellite and port authority data indicated that tankers supplying the Myanmar military used similar tactics to the “ghost ships” that carry oil for Russia, Iran and North Korea, which regularly turn off location-tracking systems to avoid detection.

It said at least nine shipments of aviation fuel were delivered to Myanmar by four vessels between mid-2024 and the end of 2025 that “frequently changed names, flags or ownership and conducted ship-to-ship fuel transfers at sea, making the origin of the fuel difficult to trace.”

Satellite images of a tanker known as ‘Reef’ is seen off the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. that delivered jet fuel to Myanmar last year (Planet Labs for Amnesty).

Aviation fuel has become a highly controversial commodity in Myanmar’s civil war because of regular reports linking the Myanmar air force to war crimes — the regular bombing of hospitals, schools, churches, monasteries and homes near any scene of conflict.

“Illicit Iranian deliveries of jet fuel have powered an expansive bombing campaign by the Myanmar junta that has struck more than 1,000 civilian locations in 15 months,” according to Reuters report this week about its latest investigation.

It said Iran has also carried cargoes of urea, a key ingredient in the junta’s munitions, “including the bombs it drops from drones and paragliders.”

“Iranian deliveries to Myanmar’s military have helped shift the dynamic of the five-year civil war, which pits the junta against an array of rebel groups, none of whom have a conventional air force or a ready supply of weapons as powerful as the bombs and missiles launched by fighter jets,” it reported.

Amnesty, meanwhile, has been tracking supply lines to the Myanmar junta almost since the start of the war five years ago.

In late 2022, it published a report called Deadly Cargo with the Justice for Myanmar group, which revealed that multinational companies based in Singapore and Thailand were part of a supply chain that delivered Jet A‑1 aviation fuel to Myanmar.

That led to sanctions being imposed on the jet fuel supply chain, but Amnesty’s January 2024 analysis and July 2024 findings found a major shift in methods. Direct sales diminished and the Myanmar junta tried harder to disguise the source of its supplies.

New tactic: Iran’s ‘shadow fleet’

Fuel was bought and resold multiple times to obscure its origin. At least nine shipments reached Myanmar in 2023 and early 2024, many routed through a Vietnam storage unit, revealing deliberate tactics to evade sanctions, it said.

In its latest report, Amnesty said it had tracked multiple shipments of aviation fuel to Myanmar since July 2024, including on two US-sanctioned vessels with a history of exporting fuel from Iran (commonly known as ‘Noble’ and ‘Reef’).

“According to Kpler, a commodity intelligence platform that tracks global flows of fuels and other commodities, all shipments on these two vessels are assumed to be from Iran, while satellite imagery reviewed by Amnesty International points to a likely Iran connection,” it said.

“Significantly, Myanmar Port Authority data shows that at least 109,604 metric tonnes of aviation fuel were imported into Myanmar in 2025, a 69% increase from 2024 and the highest amount in any year since the coup – despite sanctions imposed to stop fuel reaching the country.”

From October 2024 to December 2025, Iran delivered a total of about 175,000 tons of jet fuel to the junta in nine shipments from Reef and a larger sister ship, Noble, according to shipping documents reviewed by Reuters, and satellite imagery and analysis by the US firm SynMax Intelligence.

‘Fueling mass atrocities’

“This fuel that is being shipped in from Iran is literally fueling mass atrocities,” the UN Rapporteur on Myanmar Tom Andrews told Reuters. “There has been an escalation in attacks on civilian targets. It’s just horrific and unacceptable. It’s important to point out those that are enabling it.”

The fuel has helped the junta regain momentum after rebel groups grabbed major bases across the north of the country in late 2023 and 2024.

The junta’s 100 or so warplanes, which includes Chinese and Russian jets, have flown many more raids since the fuel supplies ramped up.

Myanmar’s ethnic rebel groups have struggled to retain territory they seized because of aerial attacks not only by these jets, but also the junta’s increased proficiency in using thousands of drones supplied by China, as well as paragliders and other simple flying machines.

In a news release on Monday, Fortify Rights noted the increasing number of civilians being injured by bombs dropped by paramotors and gyrocopters.

Increased shipments of jet fuel allowed the military to expand its attacks on resistance groups and civilians in the lead-up to the election, which had to be held in three stages.

But the civil war is expected to drag on after it enters its sixth year on Sunday. Analysts say resistance forces need to master coordinated attacks, as well as their own use of Chinese drones, to have any chance of defeating an army bolstered by forced conscription of tens of thousands of young men.