Drone strikes on Rohingya fleeing Myanmar killed dozens of people, including families with children, with several witnesses reporting that survivors were wandering among piles of bodies to identify dead and injured relatives.
Four witnesses, activists and a diplomat described drone strikes on Monday that targeted families waiting to cross the border into neighbouring Bangladesh.
The victims included a pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in Rakhine state in recent weeks amid ongoing fighting between military troops and insurgents.
Three witnesses told Reuters on Friday that the Arakan Army was responsible, but the group denied the allegations. The militia and Myanmar’s military blamed each other. Reuters could not confirm how many people were killed in the attack or independently determine responsibility.
Videos posted on social media showed piles of bodies on a muddy field, their suitcases and bags strewn around them. Three survivors said more than 200 people had been killed, while a witness after the incident said he had seen at least 70 bodies.
Reuters has confirmed the location of the videos, just outside the Myanmar coastal city of Maungdaw. Reuters has not been able to independently confirm the date the videos were filmed.
One witness, Mohammed Ilyas, 35, said his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter were injured in the attack and later died. Ilyas told Reuters from a refugee camp in Bangladesh that he was standing with them on the beach when the drones began attacking the crowd.
“I heard the deafening sound of gunfire several times,” he said. Elias said he lay down on the ground to protect himself, and when he got up he saw that his wife and daughter were seriously injured and that several other relatives were dead.
Another witness, Shamsuddin, 28, said he survived with his wife and newborn son. Speaking from a refugee camp in Bangladesh, he said several people lay dead after the attack and “some were screaming in pain from their injuries”.
Boats carrying Rohingyas, members of a Muslim minority community facing widespread persecution in Myanmar, also sank on Monday in the Naf river that separates the two countries, killing dozens, according to two witnesses and Bangladeshi media.
Medecins Sans Frontiers said in a statement that the aid organization had treated 39 people who entered Bangladesh from Myanmar since Saturday for violence-related injuries, including mortar shell injuries and gunshot wounds. The patients reported people were bombarded while trying to find a boat to cross the river, the statement said.
A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency was “aware of the deaths of refugees after two boats capsized in the Bay of Bengal” and had heard reports of civilian deaths in Maungdaw, but could not confirm the numbers or circumstances.
Battle in the area
The Rohingya have long been persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. More than 730,000 of them fled the country in 2017 following a military-led crackdown. The United Nations said the crackdown was aimed at genocide.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power from the democratically elected government in 2021 and mass protests have spiraled into full-blown armed conflict.
Rohingya people have been leaving Rakhine for several weeks as the Arakan Army, one of several armed groups, has made sweeping gains in the north, where a large Muslim population lives.
Reuters previously reported that the militia burned down the largest Rohingya town in May, leaving Maungdaw, besieged by the insurgents, as the last major Rohingya settlement apart from the crippling displacement camps in the south. The group denies the allegations.
Activist groups condemned this week’s attacks. A senior Western diplomat said he had confirmed the reports.
“I am sorry to say that these reports of hundreds of Rohingya being killed along the Bangladesh/Myanmar border are accurate,” Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations and former special envoy to Myanmar, wrote on X on Wednesday.
The Myanmar military blamed the Arakan Army in a post on its Telegram channel.
The militia denied responsibility. “According to our investigation, family members of militants tried to go to Bangladesh from Maungdaw and the junta dropped the bomb because they went without permission,” Arakan Army spokesman Khine Thu Kha told Reuters. He was referring to Muslims who have joined Rohingya armed groups fighting against the Arakan Army.
Try to reach a safe place
Reuters confirmed the location of the video seen on social media from the position and shape of the mountain and coastline, which matched file and satellite imagery of the area.
The fence shown in one of the videos also matches the file imagery of the location. The location in the video matches the area described by Shamsuddin.
Ilyas explained how his wife and daughter died after the attack, and how he tried to find a boat to cross to Bangladesh.
He said that before his wife’s death, “we apologized to each other for any mistakes we had made in our lives.”
He said that around midnight they finally found a small boat and managed to cross the border.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
