A man and his son in a market in the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
A man and his son in a market in the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
The leader of an armed group representing a persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar was arrested in a raid in neighbouring Bangladesh this week and charged under an anti-terrorism law.
Ataullah, an ethnic Rohingya and the commander of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, was arrested on Monday, the Bangladeshi police said in a statement. He was captured in Narayanganj district, on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, according to a local police officer. Nine other suspected members of ARSA were also nabbed in raids.
The 10 suspected insurgents were charged under an antiterrorism law at a court in Narayanganj and are now in police custody, Shahinur Alam, the officer in charge at the Siddhirganj Police Station in Narayanganj, said on Wednesday.
Coordinated attacks by ARSA insurgents on security outposts in 2016 and 2017 were used as a pretext for the Myanmar military to launch a scorched-earth campaign of arson, mass rape and killing against the Rohingya minority. Dozens of Rohingya villages were wiped from the map in what the Myanmar military called “security operations”. The US has labelled the expulsion of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar to Bangladesh, which propelled the fastest outflow of refugees in recent history, a genocide.
Today, more than a million Rohingya are confined to a series of tent settlements in neighbouring Bangladesh, one of which is the largest refugee camp in the world. Gun battles in the camps between rival militant groups, including ARSA, have added yet another layer of trauma to Rohingya life and radicalised a generation of desperate youth.
ARSA and other insurgent groups have assassinated camp leaders, including those working towards a return of Rohingya to Myanmar. Militants have forcibly recruited boys and young men into their ranks. They have also directed smuggling rings that deposit young Rohingya in the sex and servant trades, according to camp elders and human rights groups.
Ataullah, the ARSA commander, was born to an exiled Rohingya family in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, where he received religious instruction. The group was largely unknown until thousands of its fighters besieged the Myanmar security outposts, killing about 20 police and military personnel in the 2017 attacks, according to the Myanmar government. Dressed in black, ARSA insurgents were trained to rally themselves with the battle cry “Speak loudly, Allah is the greatest,” according to the group’s members.
Ataullah, who was identified by the Bangladeshi police as Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi, secretly recruited among Rohingya in Myanmar, both young and old, arguing that only an armed rebellion could counter the decades of persecution faced by the Muslim minority in a Buddhist-majority country.
But in recent years, ARSA has become better known for gangland-style turf battles in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, fighting with other armed groups.