COX\u2019S BAZAR: Rohingya refugee Syed fled Myanmar for a second time last month, after he was forced to fight alongside the military that drove his family out of their homeland years earlier.
\nSyed, whose name has been changed to protect him from reprisals, is one of thousands of young men from the stateless and persecuted Muslim minority rounded up to wage a war not of their own making.
\nTheir conscription into the ranks of junta-run Myanmar\u2019s military has prompted revenge attacks against civilians and pushed thousands more into Bangladesh, already host to around a million Rohingya refugees.
\n\u201cThe people there are suffering a lot. I saw that with my own eyes,\u201d Syed told AFP, soon after his escape and return to the squalid Bangladeshi relief camp he has called home for the past seven years.
\n\u201cSome are starving, they are dying of hunger,\u201d the 23-year-old added. \u201cEveryone else is busy trying to save their own lives.\u201d
\nSyed said he was conscripted by a Rohingya armed group operating in the camps in June and sent to fight against the Arakan Army, a rebel group waging war against Myanmar\u2019s junta to carve out its own autonomous homeland.
\nHe and other Rohingya recruits were put to work as porters, digging ditches and fetching water for Myanmar troops as they bunkered in against advancing rebel troops.
\n\u201cThey didn\u2019t give us any training,\u201d he said. \u201cThe military stay in the police stations, they don\u2019t go out.\u201d
\nSent on patrol to a Muslim village, Syed was able to give his captors the slip and cross back over into Bangladesh.
\nHe is one of around 14,000 Rohingya to have made the crossing in recent months as the fighting near the border has escalated, according to figures given by the UN refugee agency to the Bangladeshi government.
\nExperts say that at least 2,000 Rohingya have been forcibly recruited from refugee camps in Bangldesh this year, along with many more Rohingya living in Myanmar who were also conscripted.
\nThose pressed into service in Bangladesh say they were forced to do so by armed groups, apparently in return for concessions by Myanmar\u2019s junta that could allow them to return to their homelands.
\nBoth the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, the two armed groups operating in the camps, have denied conscripting refugees.
\n\u201cWe had never forcefully recruited anyone for us or others,\u201d senior RSO leader Ko Ko Linn told AFP.
\nThe UN Human Rights Office said it had information that the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army had both committed serious abuses against the Rohingya during the conflict.
\nOther rights groups say that the press-ganging of Rohingya into service alongside Myanmar troops has fueled retaliatory attacks by the Arakan Army.
\nIn the worst documented instance, watchdog Fortify Rights said last month that the rebel group had killed more than 100 Rohingya men, women and children in a drone and mortar bombardment on the border.
\nThe Arakan Army has repeatedly denied responsibility for the attack and accusations of targeting Rohingya civilians in general.
\nBut many of the thousands of new refugees crossing into Bangladesh accuse the group of killings.
\nMohammad Johar, 22, told AFP that his brother-in-law was killed in a drone attack he blamed on the Arakan Army while the pair were fleeing the border town of Maungdaw earlier this month.
\n\u201cDead bodies were lying everywhere, dead bodies were on the banks of the river,\u201d he said.
\n\u201cThe Arakan Army is more powerful there. The Myanmar military can\u2019t keep up with the Arakan Army. And they both bomb each other, but it\u2019s the Muslims who are dying.\u201d
\nBangladesh has struggled for years to accommodate its immense population of refugees, most of whom arrived after a 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar which is the subject of an ongoing UN genocide investigation.
\nStill reeling from the sudden overthrow of its previous government by a student-led revolution last month, Bangladesh says the new arrivals are not welcome.
\n\u201cWe are sorry to say this, but it\u2019s beyond our capacity to give shelter to anyone else,\u201d interim foreign minister Touhid Hossain said this month.
\nBut after deadly attacks on some of the estimated 600,000 Rohingya still living in Myanmmar, the new arrivals said they had no choice but to seek safety across the border.
\n\u201cAfter seeing dead bodies, we were scared that more attacks were coming,\u201d 20-year-old Bibi Faiza told AFP after crossing the border with her young daughter.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t hear gunshots any more, and there is peace here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COX\u2019S BAZAR: Rohingya refugee Syed fled Myanmar for a second time last month, after he was forced to fight alongside the military that drove his family out of their homeland years earlier. Syed, whose name has been changed to protect him from reprisals, is one of thousands of young men from the stateless and persecuted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":432998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-432985","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n