Dozens of Rohingya Fleeing Myanmar Killed in Drone Attack
Editor
10 August 2024 19:55 WIB
FIGHTING IN THE REGION
The Rohingya have been long persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. More than 730,000 of them fled the country in 2017 after a military-led crackdown that the U.N. said was carried out with genocidal intent.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power from a democratically elected government in 2021, and mass protests evolved into widespread armed struggle.
Rohingya have been leaving Rakhine for weeks as the Arakan Army, one of many armed groups fighting, has made sweeping gains in the north, home to a large population of Muslims.
Reuters has previously reported that the militia burned down the largest Rohingya town in May, leaving Maungdaw, which is under siege by the rebels, as the last major Rohingya settlement aside from grim displacement camps further south. The group denied the allegations.
Activist groups condemned this week's attacks. A senior Western diplomat said he had confirmed the reports.
“These reports of hundreds of Rohingya killed at the Bangladesh/Myanmar border are, I’m sorry to say, accurate,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and a previous special envoy to Myanmar, posted on X on Wednesday.
Myanmar's junta blamed the Arakan Army in a post on its Telegram channel.
The militia denied responsibility. “According to our investigation, family members of terrorists tried to go to Bangladesh from Maungdaw and the junta dropped the bomb because they left without permission,” Arakan Army spokesman Khine Thu Kha told Reuters, referring to Muslims who have joined Rohingya armed groups fighting against the Arakan Army.
TRYING TO GET TO SAFETY
Reuters was able to confirm the location of the videos seen on social media from the position and shape of the mountain and shoreline, which matched file and satellite imagery of the area.
The fencing featured in one of the videos also matched file imagery of the location. The location of the videos matched the area described by Shamsuddin.
Eleyas described how his wife and daughter died in the aftermath of the attack, and his desperate efforts to find a boat that would take them to Bangladesh.
Before his wife died, “We apologized to each other for any wrongs we may have done in our lives,” he said.
Around midnight, he said, he finally found a small boat and managed to cross the border with it.
REUTERS
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