The offensive opened on 6 January 2022, continuing the fighting that had flared in late December 2021. Junta forces struck from multiple directions, pushing into neighborhoods where KNDF and PDF fighters had embedded themselves among the civilian population. Near the KNPP headquarters, seven people were injured. In Myung Ward, two civilians died in crossfire. The junta reportedly used aircraft to bomb the city -- an escalation that shocked residents accustomed to ground fighting. Six civilians were killed on 7 January alone. After the battle began, Loikaw shut down entirely. All government offices were vacated, and the Loikaw hospital, along with its patients and staff, was transferred to Taunggyi in Shan State. Residents described the grim calculus of urban warfare: there was nowhere to flee, yet staying meant risking death in the crossfire.

The fighting in January moved through Loikaw's neighborhoods like a slow fire. On 8 January, airstrikes continued as combat raged in Minelon Ward and Pankan. The KNDF claimed thirty junta soldiers killed that day, including a major, along with damage to a tank and a helicopter. Refugees heading toward Shan State found the roads clogged with traffic, and junta checkpoints demanded payment for vehicle inspections before allowing anyone to pass. In Doukhu Ward, a church was destroyed. Fighting spread into Minelon and My Lo wards through the evening hours. At Minelon Technical University, the KNDF reported that several junta soldiers were killed with no one to recover their bodies. Three PDF fighters died from landmines in a separate incident nearby. By mid-January, the pattern had settled into an exhausting rhythm: quiet during the day, fighting at night.

On 21 January, residents discovered thirteen bodies in Myung Ward. An NGO reported that the area remained an active combat zone, making recovery dangerous. Throughout Loikaw Township, the violence touched civilians who had nothing to do with the fighting. On 29 January, a family of six was killed in one village, a lone man in another, and two more bodies were found in a junta-controlled section of the city. Many of the dead had been bound before being killed -- some were discovered in toilets. A resident who survived junta occupation recalled soldiers announcing that "neighborhoods would be cleared," and suggested that more bodies remained undiscovered. On 9 February, three children were killed in a junta bombing of the village of Le Thu. Each death was someone's entire world collapsing.

The offensive displaced more than 90,000 people across Loikaw Township -- roughly half the population of Kayah State. Most fled toward Shan State, joining a river of refugees that had been growing since the first battle in May 2021. On 1 February, exactly one year after the coup, Lieutenant General Soe Win visited Kayah State and replaced its military-appointed leader with Zaw Myo Tin, a reshuffling that spoke to the junta's frustration with the pace of its campaign. By February, the fighting had shifted from the city center to its edges -- ambushes on the outskirts, skirmishes in outlying villages. Refugees began to trickle back into Loikaw, though the city they returned to bore little resemblance to the one they had left.

The Karenni people have been fighting for autonomy since 1949, making theirs one of the world's longest-running insurgencies. But the battles for Loikaw in 2021 and 2022 represented something new: not a guerrilla campaign in remote jungle, but sustained urban warfare for a state capital. The KNDF and local PDF groups, many formed by civilians with no prior military experience, had held Loikaw against the full weight of the Tatmadaw for months. They did not win in any conventional sense -- the city was devastated, its people scattered. But the junta did not achieve decisive control either. On 28 May, soldiers shot and killed a Karenni youth at a bus station over broken mirrors. It was a small, senseless act of violence, but it captured the reality of life under occupation: power exercised arbitrarily, against people who had already lost almost everything.