Arakan News Agency
More villages were burnt on Saturday in a northwestern Myanmar area where a number of Rohingya Muslims had taken refuge in a wave of violence in the region, two sources said.
The fires on Saturday swept up to four new residential communities in Rathidaung, destroying all Muslim villages in the region, the sources said.
“Little by little, village after village is being burned,” said Chris Lewa of Arakan Project, a Rohingya monitoring group. I think the Rohingya no longer have a presence in Rathidaung. “
“There were 11 Muslim villages (in Rathidaung) and after the last two days they all seemed to have been destroyed,” she said.
Independent journalists are not allowed to enter the region as Myanmar says that security forces are conducting purges to counter “extremist terrorists”.
Human rights monitors and Rohingya Muslims who fled the area say the army and members of popular Rakhine ethnic groups have launched a firefight to force Muslims to flee. Save nearly 290,000 in less than two weeks, causing a humanitarian crisis.
Rathidaung is the most remote area of Rohingya bordering Bangladesh. Aid workers fear large numbers of Muslims are trapped there.
