A Rohingya woman told BenarNews she was sexually assaulted by Arakan Army insurgents in Myanmar’s Rakhine state who killed three relatives, forcing her to flee to a refugee camp in Bangladesh.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous over safety concerns and is not pictured in this report, said she had grown used to the sounds of bombs falling and gunshots, but did not expect to be a victim of violence.
“One morning in August, I woke up to constant pounding at the door. The moment I opened it, a group from the Arakan Army kicked me to the ground, groped and physically assaulted me in front my family members before slaughtering my father-in-law and two brothers-in-law and dragging them out of our home,” she told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
She added that her husband was able to flee from the attackers.
“Though sometimes my village is caught between the Arakan Army and Myanmar military clashes, I never thought this conflict one day would knock on my door.”
The woman was among at least 60,000 Rohingya who have crossed the border into southeastern Bangladesh since late 2023 to seek refuge from fighting between the Arakan Army (AA) rebels and Burmese junta-affiliated military forces.
Incidents of sexual violence and other abuses against Rohingya came to light in a report published this week by the Burma Task Force, a coalition of 38 U.S. and Canadian Muslim Organizations led by Justice for All.
The report alleged that both military troops and AA insurgents had targeted Rohingya, with the rebels in some cases killing Rohingya while sparing non-Rohingya in the same village. In addition, the AA used Rohingya as human shields in battles with the military.
“The Arakan Army specifically targets girls for sexual abuse. Some women knew of rape victims; most have heard of such incidents,” the report said of interviews in the Bangladesh camps.
The Rohingya woman spoke to a BenarNews reporter at the Jadimora camp in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar, about the ordeal that brought her to Bangladesh.
“I lost consciousness during the assault. When I regained it, I saw the village completely razed and fires smoldering everywhere,” she said on Wednesday. “The villagers who were alive and injured set out on an uncertain journey toward the Bangladesh border. They took me with them.
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“I trudged along with the caravan for three days through the rugged hills, muddy plains and forest and along the way saw hundreds of bodies scattered in the forest or floating in the water.”
On a positive note, the woman reunited with her husband at the camp on the Bangladeshi side of the border.
Arakan Army
Another Rohingya woman who requested anonymity said she and her family were forced out of their homes in Myanmar and moved into a school building.
“One day in August the Arakan Army showed up at the school compound, separated the young girls and took them away, leaving their families in the dark about their whereabouts,” the woman (also not pictured) told BenarNews.
“My family fled the school as my husband feared something worse could happen to me,” she said, adding they arrived at Camp 26 in Cox’s Bazar three months ago.
A BenarNews reporter talked to a dozen women who had arrived as part of the recent influx triggered by the fighting between AA and junta troops. The Burmese military has led Myanmar since launching a coup against the government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.
The AA, an insurgent group that has been fighting with the military, is supported by Rakhine state’s Buddhist majority and has been accused of committing rights abuses against Rohingya people.
Aflatun Khatun, a Rohingya woman in her 60s who took shelter recently at the Balupara camp in Ukhia, recalled how she lost her livestock.
“Thirteen of my buffalos were killed in a drone attack in September,” she told Benar News, adding, “Many villagers died in that attack. They used the drones to target Muslim villages.”
Md Yunus, 40, who lived in Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state before crossing the border into Bangladesh in November 2024, said AA members arrived at the beginning of that month, threatened the villagers and told them to never return.
“A few days later, they again came back, set fire to the village and fatally shot those who dared to stay back,” he told BenarNews.
“That was the moment I felt a desperate need to leave my home with my wife and children. I moved to the woods, stayed there for three days before we managed to cross the border to take shelter here.”
No food
The Justice for All report said the Rohingya woes did not end after crossing into Bangladesh, as many of the new arrivals had no food or shelter.
Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, including 740,000 who fled a military offensive in Rakhine state, starting in August 2017.
Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, commissioner of Office of Refugee, Relief and Repatriation, said the Bangladesh government was working to determine the number of new refugees in the camps and has sought assistance for them.
“We provided headcount data to the World Food Program, which started providing food support to the newly arrived Rohingya,” he told BenarNews.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.