The Arakan Army (AA), which took control of large parts of Myanmar’s northern Rakhine in 2024, has since been destroying Rohingya villages and building detention camps, military barracks and settlements on their land, according to an investigation by The Guardian based on satellite images, United Nations research and the testimony of survivors.
The investigation highlights a paddy field in the Hnget Thay area of Buthidaung township, which Rohingya villagers farmed until 2024. By 2026, 120 grey buildings had been put up there, forming a detention camp run by the Arakan Army.
Rohingya families displaced from the surrounding area are held there and cannot enter or leave the camp without permission. The investigation found that the Arakan Army has built at least 10 such camps since taking control of most of northern Rakhine state.
Muhammad Ares, 18, who now lives in Bangladesh, said heavy fighting began after the Arakan Army first came to his area and many civilians were killed in the clashes. In the end, he said, the group burned his entire village to the ground, then gathered all the displaced people and forced them into a camp.
He said the group had in effect turned his homeland into a network of forced labour camps and military outposts.
About three miles from the camp, on the bank of the Mayu River, lie the rows of houses of Ywet Nyo Taung village. After the area was burned in April 2024, Rohingya farmers and boatmen lost their homes, farmland and orchards.
Mohammed Sadiq, 26, said large trees and orchards were cut down and the whole area cleared, leaving no trace of the old village, and that houses had been built on their land.
Survivors said they were forced to tear down their own homes and use the materials to build new structures for the rebels. These include a military barracks in Ywet Nyo Taung known as the “AP battalion”, where young Rohingya allege they were forcibly conscripted.
Sadiq said they were made to clear roads, dig trenches and do hard labour inside the group’s camps, and that anyone who collapsed from exhaustion was left out in the sun.
An internal UN report says that since 2024 at least 800 hectares of land in 23 Rohingya villages have been seized and turned into camps, settlements for other communities or military infrastructure. Over the same period the UN has documented at least 29 incidents in which Rohingya land was seized or Rohingya were displaced.
More than 155,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since 2024, about a quarter of the estimated 600,000 who had remained in Myanmar after the 2017 military crackdown. About 1.2 million Rohingya now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh.
A UN expert on Myanmar, speaking to The Guardian on condition of anonymity, said this was beyond question the end of the Rohingya presence in northern Rakhine. Rohingya could stay in the prison-like camps in dire conditions for as long as they could bear it, the expert said, but they would not be allowed to return home.
According to the testimony gathered by The Guardian and the UN report, Rohingya have faced torture, sexual violence, arbitrary arrest, forced labour, forced military recruitment and the collection of “taxes”. The Arakan Army is accused of using the same kinds of tactics the Myanmar military has used in the past.
One 32-year-old man said he was forcibly conscripted, held for a month and beaten repeatedly. Another said the Arakan Army took away his 22-year-old daughter, who was physically and sexually abused and forced to undergo military training.
Many of those held in the Hnget Thay camp are survivors of the killings in the Hoyyar Siri area on 2 May 2024. Human Rights Watch estimates that more than 170 villagers were killed or went missing in that incident, about 90 of them children.
The Arakan Army has denied allegations of war crimes, saying it targeted only military personnel and members of Rohingya armed groups.
Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, said the aim of those who planned and carried out the attacks on Rohingya was to change the situation on the ground in a way that could not be reversed.
His body has not yet been able to confirm that the Arakan Army is responsible for the destruction of Rohingya land, however, and he said Rohingya still in Myanmar appear to be targeted by all sides in the ongoing conflict.
Tom Dannenbaum, a professor of international law at Stanford University, said the combination of coercion and cutting the Rohingya off from their own areas could amount to the war crime of population transfer.
Aung Kyaw Moe, the only Rohingya member of Myanmar’s exiled National Unity Government, who recently stepped down, said the central question was no longer whether Rohingya could survive in Myanmar, but whether conditions were being created that would make their permanent displacement and the erasure of their physical, political and historical existence irreversible.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) began hearings in the Rohingya genocide case in January. The court has previously said that the systematic expulsion of people from their homes and the destruction of those homes can be considered an element of genocide. Its ruling on whether genocide was committed against the Rohingya in 2017 is expected this month.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report