In world's largest refugee camps, Rohingya mobilise to fight in Myanmar

Many join groups loosely allied with former military persecutors to fight ethnic militia

One day in July, Mr. Rafiq slipped out of the world's largest refugee settlement in southern Bangladesh and crossed the border into Myanmar on a small boat.

The 32-year-old's destination: a ruinous civil war in a nation that he had fled in 2017.

Thousands of Rohingya insurgents, like Mr. Rafiq, have emerged from camps housing more than a million refugees in Cox's Bazar, where militant recruitment and violence have surged in 2024, according to four people familiar with the conflict and two internal aid agency reports seen by Reuters.

"We need to fight to take back our lands," said Mr. Rafiq, a lean and bearded man in a Muslim prayer cap who spent weeks fighting in Myanmar before returning after he was shot in the leg. "There is no other way."

The Rohingya, a mainly Muslim group that is the world's largest stateless population, started fleeing in droves to Bangladesh in 2016 to escape what the UN has called a genocide at the hands of Buddhist-majority Myanmar's military.

A long-running rebellion in Myanmar has gained ground since the military staged a coup in 2021. It involves a complex array of armed groups, with Rohingya fighters now entering the fray.

Many have joined groups loosely allied with their former military persecutors to fight the Arakan Army ethnic militia that has seized much of the western Myanmar state of Rakhine, from which many Rohingya fled.

Reuters interviewed 18 people who described the rise of insurgent groups inside Bangladesh's refugee camps and reviewed two internal briefings on the security situation written by aid agencies in recent months.

The news agency is reporting for the first time the scale of recruitment by Rohingya armed groups in the camps, which totals between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters.