By V.E.K.Madhushani, Jadetimes News
Warning: This article contains details some readers may find distressing.
Fayaz and his wife believed they were moments from safety when the bombs began to fall: "We were getting on the boat one after another that’s when they started bombing us."
Wails and shouts filled the air around 17:00 local time on 5 August, Fayaz recalls, as thousands of scared Rohingyas made their way to the banks of the Naf River in the town of Maungdaw. Attacks on nearby villages meant that for hundreds of families, including Fayaz’s, escaping from western Myanmar to Bangladesh's safer shores seemed like the only option.
Fayaz carried bags stuffed with whatever they had managed to grab. His wife carried their six year old daughter, while their eldest ran alongside them. His wife’s sister was ahead, carrying the couple’s eight month old son in her arms.
The first bomb killed his sister in law instantly. The baby was badly injured but alive.
"I ran and carried him. But he died while we were waiting for the bombing to stop."
Nisar had also made it to the riverbank by about 17:00, having decided to escape with his mother, wife, son, daughter, and sister. "We heard drones overhead and then the loud sound of an explosion," he recalls. "We were all thrown to the ground. They dropped bombs on us using drones."
Nisar was the only one of his family to survive.
Fayaz, his wife, and daughters eventually made it across the river. Despite his pleas, the boatman refused to allow Fayaz to bring the baby's body with them. "He said there was no point in carrying the dead, so I dug a hole by the riverbank and hastily buried him."
Now in the relative safety of Bangladesh, they face the risk of being sent back if caught by authorities. Nisar clutches a Quran, still unable to process how his world was shattered in a single day.
"If I’d known what would happen, I would never have tried to leave that day," Nisar says.
It's notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar's civil war. However, through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August has emerged. Survivors' videos show the riverbank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children. There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses reported seeing scores of bodies.
All the survivors unarmed Rohingya civilians recount hearing many bombs exploding over two hours. While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly used in Myanmar, some said they were also hit by mortars and gunfire. The MSF clinic operating in Bangladesh reported a surge in wounded Rohingya in the days that followed half of the injured were women and children.
Survivors say they were attacked by the Arakan Army (AA), one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar, which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State. After being attacked in their villages, they were assaulted again by the riverbank as they sought to escape. The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesperson denied the accusations, claiming the incident did not occur in areas controlled by them. The spokesperson also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely blaming the AA.
Nisar stands by his account. "The Arakan Army is lying," he says. "The attacks were done by them. It was only them in our area on that day. They don’t want to leave any Muslim alive."
Most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims live as a minority in Rakhine a Buddhist-majority state where the two communities have long had a fraught relationship. In 2017, when the Myanmar military killed thousands of Rohingyas in what the UN described as "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing," local Rakhine men also joined the attacks. Now, amid a spiraling conflict between the junta and the AA, which has strong support in the ethnic Rakhine population, Rohingyas once again find themselves trapped.
Despite the risk of being caught and returned to Myanmar by Bangladeshi authorities, Rohingya survivors shared details of the violence they faced so it would not go undocumented, especially as it unfolded in an area no longer accessible to rights groups or journalists.
"My heart is broken. Now, I’ve lost everything. I don’t know why I survived," Nisar says.
A wealthy Rohingya trader, Nisar had sold his land and house as the shelling increased near his home in Rakhine. But the conflict intensified faster than he expected, and on the morning of 5 August, the family decided to leave Myanmar. Nisar cried as he pointed to his daughter’s body in one of the videos: "My daughter died in my arms saying Allah’s name. She looks so peaceful, like she’s sleeping. She loved me so much."
In the same video, he also pointed to his wife and sister, both severely injured but alive when the video was filmed. He could not carry them out as bombs were still falling, so he made the agonizing choice to leave them behind. He found out later they had died.
"There was nowhere left that was safe, so we ran to the river to cross over to Bangladesh," Fayaz says. The gunfire and bombs had followed them from village to village, and Fayaz gave all his money to a boatman to carry them across the river. Devastated and angry, he holds up a photo of his son’s bloodied body. "If the Arakan Army didn’t fire at us, then who did?" he asks. "The direction that the bombs came from, I know the Arakan Army was there. Or was it thunder falling from the sky?"
These accusations raise serious questions about the Arakan Army, which describes itself as a revolutionary movement representing all the people of Rakhine.
Since late last year, the AA, part of the larger Three Brotherhood Alliance of armed insurgents in Myanmar, has made significant gains against the military. But the army’s losses have brought new dangers for Rohingyas, who have previously reported being forcibly recruited by the junta to fight the AA.
This, together with the decision by the Rohingya militant group ARSA to ally with the junta against the Rakhine insurgents, has worsened already poor relations between the two communities and left Rohingya civilians vulnerable to retribution.
One survivor of the 5 August attack mentioned that ARSA militants aligned with the junta were among the fleeing crowd, which might have provoked the attack. "Even if there was any military target, there was a disproportionate use of force. There were children, women, the elderly that were killed that day. It was also indiscriminate," says John Quinley, a director of the human rights group Fortify Rights, which has been investigating the incident. "So that would lead us to believe that there are reasonable grounds to believe that a war crime did happen on 5 August. The Arakan Army should be investigated for these crimes and Arakan Army senior commanders should be held accountable."
This is a precarious moment for the Rohingya community. More than a million of them fled to Bangladesh in 2017, where they continue to be confined to densely packed, squalid camps. More have been arriving in recent months as the war in Rakhine reaches them, but it’s no longer 2017 when Bangladesh opened its borders. This time, the government has said it cannot allow any more Rohingyas into the country.
Survivors who can find the money to pay boatmen and traffickers at a cost of 600,000 Burmese kyat ($184; £141) per person then have to slip past Bangladeshi border guards, take their chances with locals, or hide in Rohingya camps.
When Fayaz and his family arrived in Bangladesh on 6 August, the border guards gave them a meal but then put them on a boat and sent them back. "We spent two days afloat with no food or water," he says. "I gave my daughters water from the river to drink and pleaded with some of the others on the boat to give them a few biscuits from the packets they had."
They succeeded on their second attempt. But at least two boats have capsized due to overcrowding. One woman, a widow with 10 children, said she managed to hide her family during the bombing, but five of her children drowned when their boat overturned.
"My children were like pieces of my heart. When I think of them, I want to die," she says, weeping. Her grandson, a wide eyed eight year old boy, sits beside her. His parents and younger brother also died.
But what of those left behind? Phone and internet networks in Maungdaw have been down for weeks, but after repeated attempts, contact was made with one man who wished to remain anonymous for his own safety.
"The Arakan Army has forced us out of our homes and is holding us in schools and mosques," he said. "I am being kept with six other families in a small house."
The Arakan Army claimed it rescued 20,000 civilians from the town amid fighting against the military. It said it was providing them with food and medical treatment, adding that "these operations are conducted for the safety and security of these individuals, not as forced relocations."
The man on the phone rejected their claims. "The Arakan Army has told us they will shoot us if we try to leave. We are running out of food and medicines. I am ill, my mother is ill. A lot of people have diarrhea and are vomiting." He broke down, pleading for help: "Tens of thousands of Rohingya are under threat here. If you can, please save us."
