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.”