Arakan News Agency
Hundreds of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar crossed the border to Bangladesh over the weekend and on Monday, aid workers said, seeking shelter from escalating violence in the northwest that has killed at least 86 people and displaced some 30,000.
An official from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations’ migration agency, who did not want to be identified, said he had witnessed more than 500 people enter its camps in the hills near the border on Monday.
Aid workers from other United Nations agencies and Reuters reporters in the IOM camps also reported seeing Rohingyas who said they had recently fled the fighting in Myanmar. The UN workers did not give specific numbers, but expressed concern about a sudden influx of people.
The bloodshed is the most serious since hundreds were killed in communal clashes in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine in 2012, and is posing the biggest test yet for the eight-month-old administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
Soldiers have poured into the area along Myanmar’s frontier with Bangladesh, responding to coordinated attacks on three border posts on Oct. 9 that killed nine police officers.
Moulavi Aziz Khan, 60, from a village in northern Arakan, said he left Myanmar last week, after the military surrounded his home and set fire to it.
“At that time, I fled with my four daughters and three grandsons to a nearby hill … later, we managed to cross the border,” he said.
Myanmar’s military and the government have rejected allegations by residents and rights groups that soldiers have raped Rohingya women, burnt houses and killed civilians during the military operation in Arakan.
Source : Reuters
