Rohingya Muslims: A ticking bomb waiting to go off

Ahmed Sultan

In 2017, Myanmar was the scene of a series of attacks by a rebel group on police stations.

The attacks came hard on the heels of a campaign by the Myanmar army against the minority Rohingya Muslims who are viewed as a bunch of illegal immigrants by the government of Myanmar.

Ethnic cleansing

The campaign left 10,000 Rohingya Muslims dead. Around 400 villages, where these Muslims used to lived, were also decimated. Close to 800,000 Muslims also fled to neighboring Bangladesh. The United Nations said the campaign amounted to “ethnic cleansing”.

In Bangladesh, those fleeing the violence in Myanmar lived in refugee camps.

Nevertheless, this is a crisis not easy to resolve, according to international think tank War on the Rocks.

It says the government of Myanmar moves ahead with its violations against the Rohingya Muslims. International sanctions, the think tank said, have not succeeded in stopping these violations.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute referred to satellite images that showed the total destruction of Rohingya villages and the construction of military camps instead.

Fertile soil for terrorism

The United Nations refugee agency has failed in catering to the needs of the Rohingya Muslims living in the camps in Bangladesh.  The international community has only succeeded in making the funds necessary for 69% of the needs of these people available.

The government of Bangladesh has appealed to the international community to contribute $920 million for the Rohingya refugees in 2019. Nonetheless, only a fraction of this amount of money has arrived.

This is a situation now being exploited by Islamist parties and agencies in Bangladesh. Most of these parties work to draw in the refugees, using their poor conditions.

The Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamist parties established around 1,000 for the Rohingya children.

Arkan Rohingya Salvation Army also worked to draw in a number of the refugees and recruiting them with the aim of using them in staging terrorist operations inside Myanmar.

The army is accused of involvement in the assassination of 22 Myanmar politicians who participated in the campaign against the Rohingya Muslims.

Arkan Rohingya

Bangladesh police tried to eradicate Arkan Rohingya, but it failed because its members managed to sneak into the refugee camps.

A Malaysian counterterrorism official said that a number of refugees offer financial support to the members of Arkan Rohingya.

He added that those offering support to the members of the organization pin their hopes on it to protect their relatives who are still living in Myanmar.

IS and al-Qaeda

In a September 2017 statement, al-Qaeda vowed take revenge on the government of Myanmar because of its violations against Rohingya Muslims.

Indian intelligence has arrested a number of al-Qaeda members. It said they planned a number of terrorist attacks in Myanmar.

The Islamic State group, meanwhile, threatened to stage terrorist attacks in Myanmar.

IS senior official Abu Ibrahim al-Hanif said his organization is capable of staging attacks in the Asian state.