Rohingya insurgency gains momentum in Myanmar
Evidence is mounting the new Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army is gearing up for a more lethal and sophisticated campaign against state forces
By
ANTHONY DAVIS AUGUST 15, 2017
A Myanmar border guard police officer escorts reporters upriver in Buthidaung township, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar July 14, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Simon Lewis
A village headman assaulted by machete-wielding men in a tea-shop; six villagers stabbed and shot dead in their fields; a blast in a house as locals attempt to assemble a home-made bomb.
This month has seen a marked increase in violence in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and the unrest is sending security forces a blunt message: despite the ferocity of last year’s army-led crackdown which left scores of Rohingya civilians dead and sent over 70,000 refugees into neighboring Bangladesh, a renewed and almost certainly wider conflict is brewing.
Rohingya Muslim militants, who last October launched surprise attacks on three border police posts that killed nine officers, have stepped up preparations for a revived insurgency during the area’s rainy season that constrains major military sweeps.
That’s involved asserting control over local communities, accelerating recruitment and expanding military training activities across all three majority Rohingya townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung, the epicenter of last year’s militant attacks and military crackdown.
A man suspected of being one of the attackers in border raids is taken to a police station in Sittwe, capital of the Rakhine state in an October 10, 2016 photo. Photo: AFP
At the same time, regional intelligence sources who spoke to Asia Times note that external support in the forms of arms and funding have in recent months reached the militants via Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh.
The evidence of preparations for a widened revolt has been regularly reported in Myanmar’s state media, seen in a rising rate of targeted killings of mostly Muslim civilians apparently viewed as collaborating with the security services (such as interpreters) or local government administration.
To eliminate government intelligence assets and to instill an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, the killings have typically involved individuals being dragged from their homes after dark and stabbed or slashed to death by groups of men sometimes reportedly dressed in black fatigues and wearing face masks. Bodies of abducted individuals have on occasion been found decapitated.
Both the scope and tempo of the killing campaign, which began last year, has risen in recent months. Incidents which started in Maungdaw township where most of the violence in late 2016 was concentrated have now spread to include Buthidaung and Rathedaung, according to local media reports, and appear increasingly to involve brazen day-light assaults.
At the same time, the rate of attacks which early this year occurred roughly once a week or less frequently has now increased notably to several incidents a week. According to official figures from the office of State Counsellor Aung san Suu Kyi, over 50 individuals have now been either murdered or abducted between October and the end of July.
A Myanmar border guard police officer stands guard in Tin May village, Buthidaung township, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar July 14, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Simon Lewis
In what was originally an almost exclusively Muslim target-set, the number of Buddhists attacked is now ominously rising.
The arguably most striking incident came on August 3 with the killing of six Buddhist farmers and the abduction of two others in Maungdaw. In some cases, killings of Buddhists have triggered the flight of scores of Buddhist civilians to township centers where state security is assured.
The pattern of insurgent activity suggests a broadly centralized command and control structure on the part of a group which was first identified late last year as Harakat al Yaqin (HaY), or Movement of Faith, but which this year rebranded itself as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
As seen by several security analysts who spoke to Asia Times, the name-change was probably driven by the group’s desire to distance itself from any association with Arabic-sounding jihadist radicalism. HaY/ARSA is understood to have emerged from the extensive Rohingya diaspora in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and the Pakistani city of Karachi.
In its limited interactions with the international media the militant group has been at pains to project itself as an ideologically moderate outfit committed to securing the legitimate rights of an ethnic community of some 1.1 million which has been denied citizenship and basic civil rights by successive Myanmar governments.
A Rohingya refugee woman walks at the Kutupalang Makeshift Refugee Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, July 8, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
Attracting less attention than the targeted killings but no less significant in terms of insurgent expansion have been efforts to revive recruitment and training activities for local youths.
This has involved the setting up of temporary camps in remote locations where basic instruction in guerrilla field-craft is imparted, apparently using mostly wooden rifles rather than real fire-arms. According to official sources, youths inducted into the ARSA training modules of one or two weeks are required to swear a vow of secrecy on the Koran and, at least in some cases, are said to be paid.
Much of the training activity has centered on the Mayu Range, a spine of jungled hills that runs broadly north-south between the arable flatlands of Maungdaw to the east and Buthidaung to the west, and is thus easily accessible from both townships.
On June 20, police responding to a tip-off of training activities discovered a camp in the hills a three-hour trek from the nearest village in Maungdaw. One of several now identified, the facility included a large tunnel measuring over four feet high, by five feet wide and 80 feet in length. In the ensuing operation, three militants were killed either in or near the tunnel, while police also retrieved 20 wooden guns, two homemade firearms and food supplies.
Training also appears to have focused on the production of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Probably for logistical reasons and given the smaller number of people involved, these courses have apparently taken place in safe houses in villages rather than the remote jungle camps. In recent weeks, there have been several cases of either security forces breaking up training sessions and triggering clashes or incidents involving apparently accidental explosions.
A Myanmar soldier holding a banner with Arabic writing with pouches containing bullets and documents seized inside a house during military operations in search of attackers in Maungdaw located in Rakhine State on October 14, 2016. Photo: AFP/Myanmar Armed Forces
Several distinct facets of insurgent activity – a systematic campaign of targeted killings of perceived state collaborators and Buddhist civilians, establishing temporary camps for clandestine basic training courses, and ritual oaths of secrecy sworn by new recruits on the Koran – mirror almost exactly the tactics and methods of the Malay-Muslim insurgency in southern Thailand, both during its preparatory phase and subsequently.
The extent, if any, to which ARSA militants and Patani-Malay insurgents of the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) are in contact remains unclear. What is not in doubt, however, is that both groups have a significant organizational presence in Malaysia and share broadly similar ethno-nationalist objectives within Buddhist-dominated states.
The deteriorating security situation has caused widespread alarm across Rakhine state’s majority Buddhist community and beyond.
Following direct appeals by Arakan National Party (ANP) politicians to armed forces commander in chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, military reinforcements of an estimated 400 troops of the crack 33rd Light Infantry Division (LID) were airlifted into the state capital of Sittwe on August 10 and moved north to Maungdaw the next day.
Given the relatively small size of the reinforcements, the ongoing rains and an absence of any obvious military objectives it seems likely the airlift was intended more to reassure the state’s rattled Buddhist community and bolster local para-military police than as the prelude to immediate large-scale offensive operations.
With the onset of the dry season at year’s end, the traditional time of year for military offensives in Myanmar, expect a more robust security force response to the gathering threat and a potentially better-organized and more lethal militant reaction.
http://www.atimes.com/article/rohingya-insurgency-gains-momentum-myanmar/
Foreign support gives Rohingya militants a lethal edge
Myanmar's rebel Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army is receiving guns, funds and guidance from a diaspora based in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia to Pakistan
By
ANTHONY DAVIS AUGUST 15, 2017
Bangladeshi activists protest in Dhaka against the deaths of Rohingya in Myanmar's Rakhine state late last year. Photo: Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Reuters
Against a backdrop of stepped up preparations for a Rohingya revolt across the majority-Muslim townships of Rakhine state, reports of external assistance including new weaponry reaching the militants have added ominously to the prospects for expanded violence with the onset of the dry season.
Given the large size of the Rohingya diaspora of several hundred thousand in the Gulf, Pakistan and Malaysia, and the wave of international publicity focused on the Myanmar’s brutal military crackdown late last year, the channeling of external assistance to the incipient insurgency is hardly surprising.
The Rohingya organization that has claimed responsibility for recent violence — the Harakat al Yaqin (HaY), now rebranded the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) – is understood to have a leadership council based in Saudi Arabia and local leaders with backgrounds in Pakistan. It’s a support network that will almost certainly translate into donations from established businessmen in both countries.
One senior regional intelligence official noted to Asia Times that a group of senior Rohingya clerics based in Saudi Arabia has already played an important role in fundraising and facilitating money transfers. According to the same source, Malaysia has emerged as both a major clearing house for ARSA funding, and, given its Muslim-friendly visa regime, as a transit point for the movement of militants.
There are currently at least 100,000 – and possibly as many as 130,000 Rohingya refugees and migrant laborers – living in Malaysia. Of those only 58,000 are documented with the UNHCR, straining the capabilities of local security services to monitor their movements.
Rohingya refugees wait for access to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) building in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, August 11, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Olivia Harris
With relations between Myanmar and Malaysia in a deep freeze over the Rakhine crisis, and with ties with neighboring Bangladesh perennially fraught, the Myanmar military has looked primarily to Buddhist Thailand to assist in checking as far as possible the movement of money and militants into the emerging zone of conflict along its western border.
Early this year a senior delegation of Myanmar Armed Forces, or Tatmadaw, officials held talks with counterparts in the Thai intelligence community, assuring them that reports of military atrocities against Rohingya civilians during the October-November “clearance operations” were Western propaganda. They also aimed to ramp up intelligence exchanges on the issue of “Islamist terrorism” with the Thais.
Specific concerns have focused on the Thai border town of Mae Sot, which has predictably emerged as the main conduit for couriers and militants traveling overland north from Malaysia and into Myanmar.
Muslims protest against what they say is Myanmar’s crackdown on ethnic Rohingya Muslims, outside the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, Thailand November 25, 2016. Photo: Reuters/Jorge Silva
A rapidly expanding trade and light industrial hub of some 200,000 people on Thailand’s western border with Myanmar, Mae Sot has long had a significant Muslim population and served as a hub for Myanmar migrant workers — many of them undocumented – to move back and forth across the border.
In the 2013-2014 period, Rohingya militants reportedly made short-lived attempts to establish training courses in or near the town, according to sources in northern Thailand. Whether at any point these involved arms training as distinct from political and organizational courses is not clear, but the activities were shuttered in short order by Thai authorities.
Against a backdrop of decades of strained relations with Bangladesh, Myanmar’s western border, where at least one consignment of small-arms has reportedly reached the militants, poses perhaps a graver threat.
Photographs taken on a mobile phone and seen recently by Asia Times showed a crate of new Kalashnikov-series assault rifles – apparently Chinese manufactured Type 56 7.62mm rifles — and a group of youths in sarongs and tee-shirts being trained in the use of the weapons by older instructors.
In view of the tight security lockdown imposed by the Myanmar security forces across Rakhine state since last October, it is far more likely that the weapons reached ARSA through southern Bangladesh than from inside Myanmar.
It was not clear from the images whether the training was taking place inside Rakhine state or in a secure location across the border in Bangladesh.
A Myanmar border guard police officer stands guard in Tin May village, Buthidaung township, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar July 14, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Simon Lewis
Since the October-November crackdown, an estimated 70,000 refugees have fled across the Naf River border to join at least 300,000 displaced Rohingya already settled in the southern Bangladeshi districts of Chittagong, Cox’s Bazaar and Bandarban.
However, if the training was taking place inside Rakhine state, then it seems likely that it would have been conducted close to the land-border rather than in more densely populated areas further south where even in the Mayu Hills security is far more difficult to ensure.
The source of the weapons consignment — or possibly consignments — is also open to conjecture. As funding is likely not a significant constraint, small-arms could be sourced either on Southeast Asia’s brisk black market in weapons, in Karachi, or from Gulf entrepots such as Sharjah and Abu Dubai.
They could then be easily moved ashore from freighters operating in the Bay of Bengal to points along the extended coastline of southern Bangladesh through fishing boats.
Bangladesh coast guards patrol in a vessel in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, February 2, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
The northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal are already criss-crossed by well-established smuggling operations moving people — both Rohingya and Bangladeshi — from Bangladesh to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. In the late 1990s and early 2000’s, several major illicit arms shipments to insurgent forces in the northeastern region of India were made via the same route.
In the most notorious such case in April 2004, a massive consignment of black market weaponry consisting of nearly 2,000 assault rifles, grenades and rocket-launchers was intercepted as it landed at a wharf on the Karnaphuli River in Chittagong, having been transshipped from a freighter ‘mothership’ to two fishing trawlers.
Relatively smaller shipments could be landed off smaller fishing boats with far less risk directly onto a beach and overland to Myanmar’s emerging Rakhine state civil war.
http://www.atimes.com/article/foreign-support-gives-rohingya-militants-lethal-edge/
