Forced to fight along Myanmar military, say Rohingya recruits

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 persecuted Muslim minority rounded up to wage a war not of their own making. Their conscription into the ranks of junta-run Myanmar’s military has prompted revenge attacks against civilians and pushed thousands more into Bangladesh, already host to around a million Rohingya refugees.

“The people there are suffering a lot. I saw that with my own eyes,” Syed said, soon after his escape and return to the squalid Bangladeshi relief camp, he has called home for the past seven years.

Syed said he was conscripted by a Rohingya armed group operating in the camps in June and sent to fight against the Arakan Army (AA), a rebel group waging war against Myanmar’s junta to carve out its own autonomous homeland. He 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.

“They didn’t give us any training,” he said. Sent on patrol to a Muslim village, he was able to give his captors the slip and cross back over into Bangladesh. He 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.

Concessions from army

Experts 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. Those pressed into service in Bangladesh say they were forced to do so by armed groups, apparently in return for concessions by Myanmar’s junta that could allow them to return to their homelands.

Mohammad Johar, 22, said that his brother-in-law was killed in a drone attack he blamed on the AA while the pair were fleeing the border town of Maungdaw earlier this month. “The Myanmar military cannot keep up with the AA... they both bomb each other, but it is the Muslims who are dying,” he said Both the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation, the two armed groups operating in the camps, have denied conscripting refugees.

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