COX’S BAZAR: 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 stateless and 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 told AFP, soon after his escape and return to the squalid Bangladeshi relief camp he has called home for the past seven years.
“Some are starving, they are dying of hunger,” the 23-year-old added. “Everyone else is busy trying to save their own lives.”
Syed said he was conscripted by a Rohingya armed group operating in the camps in June and sent to fight against the Arakan Army, 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. “The military stay in the police stations, they don’t go out.”
Sent on patrol to a Muslim village, Syed 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.
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.
Both the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, the two armed groups operating in the camps, have denied conscripting refugees.
“We had never forcefully recruited anyone for us or others,” senior RSO leader Ko Ko Linn told AFP.
The UN Human Rights Office said it had information that the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army had both committed serious abuses against the Rohingya during the conflict.
Other rights groups say that the press-ganging of Rohingya into service alongside Myanmar troops has fueled retaliatory attacks by the Arakan Army.
In the worst documented instance, watchdog Fortify Rights said last month that the rebel group had killed more than 100 Rohingya men, women and children in a drone and mortar bombardment on the border.
The Arakan Army has repeatedly denied responsibility for the attack and accusations of targeting Rohingya civilians in general.
But many of the thousands of new refugees crossing into Bangladesh accuse the group of killings.
Mohammad Johar, 22, told AFP that his brother-in-law was killed in a drone attack he blamed on the Arakan Army while the pair were fleeing the border town of Maungdaw earlier this month.
“Dead bodies were lying everywhere, dead bodies were on the banks of the river,” he said.
“The Arakan Army is more powerful there. The Myanmar military can’t keep up with the Arakan Army. And they both bomb each other, but it’s the Muslims who are dying.”
Bangladesh has struggled for years to accommodate its immense population of refugees, most of whom arrived after a 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar which is the subject of an ongoing UN genocide investigation.
Still reeling from the sudden overthrow of its previous government by a student-led revolution last month, Bangladesh says the new arrivals are not welcome.
“We are sorry to say this, but it’s beyond our capacity to give shelter to anyone else,” interim foreign minister Touhid Hossain said this month.
But after deadly attacks on some of the estimated 600,000 Rohingya still living in Myanmmar, the new arrivals said they had no choice but to seek safety across the border.
“After seeing dead bodies, we were scared that more attacks were coming,” 20-year-old Bibi Faiza told AFP after crossing the border with her young daughter.
“I don’t hear gunshots any more, and there is peace here.”
Rohingya refugees detail worsening violence in Myanmar
https://arab.news/g9bhk
Rohingya refugees detail worsening violence in Myanmar
Putin meets Erdogan, praises Turkiye’s mediation efforts on Ukraine
“I’m confident that Turkiye’s special role in these matters will continue to be in demand,” the Russian president said during talks with Erdogan on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.
Putin added that the three rounds of direct talks with Ukraine in Istanbul have made some progress on the humanitarian track.
The talks have failed to yield a breakthrough over Russia’s three-and-a-half-year invasion and resulted only in exchanges of prisoners and soldiers’ bodies.
The warring sides have radically different positions and Ukraine has accused Russia of sending low-level officials with no real decision-making power to the Istanbul talks.
Russia has called on Ukraine to effectively cede four regions that Moscow claims to have annexed, a demand Kyiv has called unacceptable.
US President Donald Trump has called for a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but Moscow said it was too early to do so before key issues are resolved.
Russia’s full-scale invasion, launched in February 2022, has ravaged swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine, killing tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.
Zelensky to meet European leaders in Paris
“We’re planning such a meeting” between Zelensky and “European leaders,” the source said, adding that “(US President Donald Trump) is not so far expected to be there.”
Ukraine suspects Russia involved in killing of former parliamentary speaker, says police chief
- ‘We know that this crime was not accidental. There is Russian involvement. Everyone will be held accountable before the law’
- Russia has not commented on the killing or on the suggestion that it was involved in the incident
KYIV: Ukraine suspects Russian involvement in the murder of former parliamentary speaker Andriy Parubiy, the head of the Ukrainian police said on Monday.
Parubiy was shot dead in the western city of Lviv on Saturday and President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier on Monday that a suspect had been arrested for what he called “a horrific murder” that impacted “security in a country at war.”
“We know that this crime was not accidental. There is Russian involvement. Everyone will be held accountable before the law,” police chief Ivan Vyhivskyi said on Facebook.
Russia has not commented on the killing or on the suggestion that it was involved in the incident.
Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said on the Telegram messaging app that the suspected shooter had been detained overnight in the Khmelnytskyi region in western Ukraine.
“Many details cannot be shared at this time,” Klymenko said. “I will only say that the crime was carefully planned: the victim’s movements were studied, a route was mapped out, and an escape plan was thought through.”
Police chief Vyhivskyi said the suspect had disguised himself as a courier and had opened fire on Parubiy in broad daylight, firing his weapon eight times.
The shooter even made sure that the victim was dead, Vyhivskyi added.
“He spent a long time preparing, watching, planning, and finally pulling the trigger. It took us only 36 hours to track him down and arrest him,” Vyhivskyi added.
Police published two photographs from the scene of the arrest that show two special forces officers holding a handcuffed man by the arms. Naked to the waist, he has his back to the camera and his face is not visible.
Parubiy, 54, was a member of Ukraine’s parliament and had served as parliamentary speaker from April 2016 to August 2019. He was one of the leaders of protests in 2013-14 demanding closer ties with the European Union that led to the ousting of Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovich.
Parubiy was also secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council from February to August 2014, a period when Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula and Moscow-backed separatists began fighting government forces in eastern Ukraine.
Afghan earthquake of magnitude 6 kills 622, injures over 1,500
- The disaster will further stretch the resources of the South Asian nation
- Rescuers race to reach remote hamlets dotting an area with a long history of earthquakes and floods
KABUL: More than 600 people were killed and over 1,500 injured in one of Afghanistan’s worst earthquakes, authorities said on Monday, as helicopters ferried the wounded to hospital after they were plucked from rubble being combed for survivors.
The disaster will further stretch the resources of the South Asian nation already grappling with humanitarian crises, from a sharp drop in aid to a huge pushback of its citizens from neighboring countries.
The quake of magnitude 6 killed at least 622 people in the eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar, the Taliban-run Afghan interior ministry said, with more than 1,500 injured and numerous houses destroyed.
“All our ... teams have been mobilized to accelerate assistance, so that comprehensive and full support can be provided,” ministry spokesperson Abdul Maten Qanee told Reuters, citing efforts in areas from security to food and health.
In Kabul, the capital, health authorities said rescuers were racing to reach remote hamlets dotting an area with a long history of earthquakes and floods.
The earthquake was Afghanistan’s deadliest since June 2022, when tremors of magnitude 6.1 killed at least 1,000 people.
Images from Reuters Television showed helicopters ferrying out the affected, while residents helped soldiers and medics carry the wounded to ambulances.
The quake razed three villages in Kunar, with substantial damage in many others, authorities said. At least 610 people were killed in Kunar with 12 dead in Nangarhar, they added.
Rescuers were scrambling to find survivors in the area bordering Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, where homes of mud and stone were levelled by the midnight quake that hit at a depth of 10 kilometers.
Military rescue teams fanned out across the two provinces, the defense ministry said in a statement, adding that 40 flights had carried out 420 wounded and dead.
“So far, no foreign governments have reached out to provide support for rescue or relief work,” a foreign office spokesperson said.
Afghanistan is prone to deadly earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.
A series of earthquakes in its west killed more than 1,000 people last year, underscoring the vulnerability of one of the world’s poorest countries to natural disasters.
Bangladesh leader warns ‘extremely dangerous’ if polls derailed
- A key recent source of contention is whether the Jatiya Party, seen as a former ally of Sheikh Hasina, should be allowed to take part in elections
- Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamist party in the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people, has demanded Jatiya Party be excluded
DHAKA: Bangladesh’s leader has warned that any deviation from planned elections would be “extremely dangerous,” as violent political rivalries deepen a year after the overthrow of longtime prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
The warning comes after protests in the South Asian nation, which left a key leader hospitalized, with parties vying for power ahead of the first elections since the uprising.
Arguments between parties have escalated, including over who will be able to contest in the polls, scheduled for February, as well as the bid by interim leader Muhammad Yunus to push through a raft of democratic reforms.
“The chief adviser said there is no alternative to an election,” Yunus’ press secretary Shafiqul Alam said late Sunday. “Any deviation from it would be extremely dangerous for the country.”
Yunus, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who has been leading the caretaker government as its chief adviser since the August 2024 uprising, held rounds of meetings with key parties on Sunday.
A key recent source of contention is whether the Jatiya Party, seen as a former ally of Hasina, should be allowed to take part in elections.
On Friday, violent clashes erupted in Dhaka when the Gono Odhikar Parishad party held a rally demanding it be banned.
Gono Odhikar Parishad party leader Nurul Haque Nur was badly beaten when the police and military sought to stop the rally.
Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamist party in the Muslim-majority nation of 170 million people, has also demanded Jatiya be excluded. Hasina’s Awami League has already been banned.
Violent protests were reported in universities, including at Chittagong University, where around a hundred students were injured on Saturday.
Parties are yet to agree on efforts by Yunus to create a charter for democratic reforms.
Yunus has previously said he inherited a “completely broken down” system of public administration, and that it required a comprehensive overhaul to prevent a future return to authoritarian rule.
A 28-page draft proposes limits on prime ministerial powers to two terms, and the expansion of presidential powers.
Parties are yet to agree on the proposed reforms – and whether they would be legally binding, or even override the existing constitution.
