Thousands of Rohingya insurgents have emerged from camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where recruitment and violence have surged this year; many have joined groups loosely allied with their former military persecutors to fight the Arakan Army that has seized much of the State of Rakhine.
One day in July, Rafiq, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used, slipped out of the world’s largest refugee settlement in southern Bangladesh and crossed the border into Myanmar on a small boat. His destination: a ruinous civil war in a nation that he had fled in 2017.
Thousands of Rohingya insurgents, like 32-year-old Rafiq, have emerged from camps housing over a million refugees in Cox’s Bazar, where militant recruitment and violence have surged this year, according to four people familiar with the conflict and two internal aid agency reports.
“We need to fight to take back our lands,” said Rafiq, a lean and bearded man in a Muslim prayer cap who spent weeks fighting in Myanmar before returning after he was shot in the leg.
“There is no other way.”
The Rohingya, a mainly Muslim group that is the world’s largest stateless population, started fleeing in droves to Bangladesh in 2016 to escape what the UN has called a genocide at the hands of Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s military.
A long-running rebellion in Myanmar has gained ground since the military staged a coup in 2021. It involves a complex array of armed groups — with Rohingya fighters now entering the fray. Many have joined groups loosely allied with their former military persecutors to fight the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic militia that has seized much of the western Myanmar State of Rakhine, from which many Rohingya fled.
Basic protection
The junta in Myanmar denied in a statement that it had conscripted any “Muslims.” “Muslim residents requested protection. So, basic military training was provided in order to help them defend their own villages and regions,” it said.
The two largest Rohingya militant groups — the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) and the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) — do not appear to have mass support in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, said Shahab Enam Khan, an international relations professor at Bangladesh’s Jahangirnagar University.
But the emergence of trained Rohingya fighters and weapons in and around the camps is regarded as a ticking time bomb by Bangladesh, one security source said.
Disillusioned refugees could be drawn by non-state actors into militant activities and pushed further into criminal enterprises, said Mr. Khan. “This will then suck in regional countries, too.”
After a boat-ride from near the camps to the western Myanmar town of Maungdaw around the midyear monsoon, Rohingya insurgent Abu Afna said he was housed and armed by junta troops.
The AA is backed by the majority Buddhist ethnic Rakhine community that includes people who joined the military in purging the Rohingya.
“Our main enemy is not the Myanmar government, but the Rakhine community,” Mr. Afna said.
Citizenship in return
The military provided Rohingya with weapons, training and cash, according to Mr. Afna, as well as a Bangladesh source and a second Rohingya man who said he was forcibly recruited by the junta.
The junta also offered the Rohingya a card certifying Myanmar citizenship.
For some, it was a powerful lure. Rohingya have long been denied citizenship despite generations living in Myanmar and are now confined to refugee camps where Bangladesh bans them from seeking formal employment.
“We did not go for the money,” Mr. Afna said. “We wanted the card, nationality.”
About 2,000 people were recruited from the refugee camps between March and May through drives employing “ideological, nationalist, and financial inducements, coupled with false promises, threats, and coercion,” according to a June aid agency briefing, which was shared on condition the authors not be named because it was not public.
Many of those brought to fight were taken by force, including children as young as 13, according to a UN official and two Rohingya fighters.
Cash-strapped Bangladesh is increasingly reluctant to take in Rohingya refugees and a person familiar with the matter said some Bangladesh officials believed armed struggle was the only way the Rohingya would return to Myanmar. They also believed that backing a rebel group would give Dhaka more sway, the person said.
Bangladesh retired Brig. Gen. Md. Manzur Qader, who has visited the camps, said his country’s government should back the Rohingya in their armed struggle, which he said would push the junta and AA to negotiate and facilitate the Rohingya’s return.
Under the previous Bangladesh government, some intelligence officials supported armed groups but with little coordination because there was no overall directive, Brig. Gen. Qader said.
Near the camps in Cox’s Bazar, where many roads are monitored by security checkpoints, dozens of Rohingya were taken earlier this year by Bangladesh officials to a jetty overlooking Maungdaw and sent across the border by boat, said Mr. Afna, who was part of the group.
“It is your country, you go and take it back,” he recalled one official telling them.
In Rakhine State, insurgents struggled to push back the heavily-armed and better drilled AA. But the battle for Maungdaw has stretched on for six months and Rohingya fighters said tactics including ambushes have slowed the rebel offensive.
Dhaka is increasingly frustrated by the AA’s strategy of attacking Rohingya settlements, the two people said, with the violence complicating efforts to repatriate refugees to Rakhine.
The AA has denied targeting Rohingya settlements and said it helps civilians without discriminating on the basis of religion.
