On a February evening, a group of Myanmar junta government soldiers detained Jan Mohammad, who is not using his real name, from Maungdaw Township in Myanmar. When they took the 24-year-old Rohingya man to a nearby military compound, he knew he was being forcibly conscripted by the Myanmar Army.
“They [the Myanmar junta soldiers] didn’t say much. They just said, ‘Come with us.’ They were pointing the gun directly at me. I was fearful when I saw the gun aiming at me,” Jan Mohammad said in an interview with the rights group Fortify Rights after he had escaped the junta’s military training camp.
He was speaking from Bangladesh, where he said he had fled 10 days after the forced military training began, according to a yet-to-be-published report by the rights group and exclusively shared with VOA.
“[During the military training], we had to learn how to crawl on our elbows and hold a gun in a line,’’ Jan Mohammad said. ‘’It was part of the military training. … I didn’t want to become a soldier. They [the Myanmar military] have been persecuting us. … Why do I need to support them all of a sudden?”
Jan Mohammad is not the only Rohingya abducted and forced into combat against his will.
Since February, at least 1,500 Rohingya men and boys have been forcibly recruited by Myanmar’s military from villages in Rakhine state in Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh, according to human rights groups and Rohingya sources.
Additionally, the rebel group Arakan Army, which is fighting the military in Myanmar, is forcibly recruiting Rohingya men and boys, and both sides fighting the war are using the youths as human shields on the battlefield, rights groups and Rohingya sources reported.
Rohingya insurgent groups are abducting youths from their community in Bangladesh and trading or “selling” them to Myanmar’s military for conscription, according to Rohingya refugee leaders.
During the 2017 crackdown, the Myanmar military killed and raped thousands of Rohingyas and burned their villages. Seven years later, the military is deploying youths from the same community in its fight against the rebel groups.
Myanmar has been engulfed in a bloody civil war that has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians since 2021, when the country’s military seized power through a coup.
Earlier this month, the U.N. issued a statement saying that the ongoing civil war had displaced over 3 million people in Myanmar. The statement also said that two-thirds of the 600,000 Rohingya Rakhine were among the displaced people.
The Arakan Army and other ethnic rebel groups are fiercely opposing the military junta’s rule. Myanmar government soldiers have lost key territory in recent months to the rebels, and many junta fighters have been killed or injured or have defected, it has been reported.
In an attempt to compensate for its lost military members, the government in February activated a decade-old conscription law that makes young men and women subject to at least two years of military service, if drafted. And, within days, it began recruiting people, including young men from the persecuted Rohingya community.
Human Rights Watch, in a statement on April 9, said that 1,000 Rohingya men and boys from the Rakhine state have been “abducted and forcibly recruited” by the Myanmar military.
This week, several Rohingya refugee community leaders in Bangladesh said that “1,500 to 2,000” Rohingya youths have been forcibly recruited by the Myanmar military and its rival, the Arakan Army, and that half of the recruits are from the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.
The Rohingya Solidarity Organization — an armed Rohingya insurgent group founded in the 1980s — abducted 27-year-old Nasir Ahmad, whose name has been changed for safety-related reasons, from the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp and sent him to the Myanmar Army for conscription.
“Some RSO men abducted me from my camp and sent me to the Myanmar Army. At a military training center in Myo Thu Gyi, near Maungdaw, I underwent arms training for 15 days and was made the leader of a group of 30 Rohingya conscripts,” Ahmad told VOA.
At the end of the training, Ahmad and his fellow Rohingya conscripts were told that soon they would be sent to the front lines of the war against the rebels.
“We knew that many soldiers, including some recently recruited Rohingya, had died while fighting as the army was losing ground, and that we would be used as human shields,” Ahmad said.
“We were too scared. Two days after my training ended, somehow I slipped out of the military center and fled back to Bangladesh.”
Jafor Alom, who is not using his real name, a 27-year-old Rohingya school teacher in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, said the Myanmar military is desperately looking for Rohingya youths for conscription.
“Mohammad Abdullah, one of my teacher colleagues, was abducted by some RSO members from Balukhali camp on May 23 and sent to Myanmar military for conscription.
‘’Two days later, he was shot dead by the military. A fellow conscript phoned me and said, ‘Abdullah told the military commanders that he was a school teacher and a soldier’s job would be very tough for him. He was shot after he refused to join the military training,’ the conscript told me,” Jafor Alom told VOA on May 28.
RSO leadership has not responded to several VOA requests for a reaction to the allegation it is assisting the Myanmar military to acquire Rohingya youths to be new junta soldiers, perhaps in a trade or barter or as a way to earn money for RSO operations.
The police chief of Cox’s Bazar district, Mohammad Mahfuzul Islam, told VOA that the allegation against the police is not true.
“The allegation that the police protect insurgents at the Rohingya refugee camps is baseless. We act against all criminal activities in the camps, whoever commits them,” chief Islam told VOA on May 28.
Rights groups have been critical of the Myanmar military for forcibly conscripting the Rohingya youths.
The military’s forceful conscription is a “deliberate strategy” aimed at creating communal conflict between the Rakhine and Rohingya communities and “disrupting the revolution against the military junta,” said Ejaz Min Khant, a human rights associate with Fortify Rights.
“This strategy also serves to further the ongoing genocide against the Rohingya. International governments must intervene and pressure the junta regime to immediately halt the conscription of Rohingya, which places them in grave danger of attacks from various armed groups,” Khant told VOA.
Human Rights Watch’s Asia division researcher Shayna Bauchner said, “in a sick twist,” the military is forcing the Rohingya to fight for their oppressors.
“Young men we’ve spoken to describe being grabbed in raids and threatened with arrest and beatings. On both sides of the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, Rohingya are trapped in limbo, vulnerable to mounting abuses,” Bauchner told VOA.
“In Rakhine, they’re being used as pawns in the deadly battle between the Myanmar military and Arakan Army.”
