A SATELLITE map has unearthed the charred remains of entire communities as terrified residents claim they are the targets of a new-world genocide.
“Some people were beheaded, and many were cut. We were in the house hiding when [armed residents from a neighbouring village] were beheading people. When we saw that, we just ran out the back of the house,” said Sultan Ahmed, a 27-year-old man from the former Chut Pyin village in Myanmar.
Sultan is among a group of 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims that are often described as “the world’s most persecuted minority”.
Rohingya people have lived for centuries in the western state of Rakhine, in Myanmar, but for decades have been persecuted by the Myanmar government. They are not considered among the country’s 135 official ethnic groups. The country has even denied them citizenship since 1982 and the state is one of the poorest in the country.
On August 27, it is alleged Myanmar state security forces and local armed-residents committed mass killings of Rohingya Muslim men, women and children. The military unleashed what it called “clearance operations”. Myanmar’s army chief justified the slaughter as “unfinished business".
“The killing spree lasted for approximately five hours — from 2pm to 7pm” reported Fortify Rights.
More than 2600 villages were burned down throughout the state. It is becoming one of the “deadliest bouts of violence involving the Muslim minority in decades”, according to Reuters.
The violence — and ensuing exodus — saw survivors bringing with them harrowing tales of rape and murder at the hands of the military and Buddhist mobs.
“Some are gaunt and spent, already starving and carrying listless and dehydrated babies, with many miles to go,” read the New York Times on the new crisis facing the modern world.
It’s a result not helped by the silence of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, accused by Western critics of failing to support the Muslim minority that has long complained of persecution.
“The military came with 200 people to the village and started fires ... All the houses in my village are already destroyed. If we go back there and the army sees us, they will shoot,” Jalal Ahmed, 60, who arrived in Bangladesh last week with a group of about 3,000 after walking for almost a week, told Reuters.
“My brother was killed — [Myanmar Army soldiers] burned him with the group. We found (my other family members) in the fields,” Abdul Rahman, a 41-year-old survivor of the attacks on Chut Pyin village, told Fortify Rights.
In the Chut Pyin village, where some of the worst violence is believed to have occurred, Abdul said his brother was among a group of Rohingya men marched into a house by soldiers who then set it alight, burning to death all inside.
“They had marks on their bodies from bullets and some had cuts.
“My two nephews, their heads were off.
“One was six years old and the other was nine years old.
“My sister-in-law was shot with a gun.”