‘My family died in front of my eyes’: Harrowing tales from a Myanmar massacre

Warning: This article contains details some readers may find distressing.

Fayaz and his wife believed they were moments from safety when the bombs began to fall: “We were getting on the boat one after another – that’s when they started bombing us.”

Wails and shouts filled the air around 17:00 local time on 5 August, Fayaz* says, as thousands of scared Rohingyas made their way to the banks of the Naf river in the town of Maungdaw.

Attacks on villages earlier in the area meant this was what hundreds of families, including Fayaz’s, saw as their only option – that to get to safety, they had to escape from western Myanmar to Bangladesh’s safer shores.

Fayaz was carrying bags stuffed with whatever they had managed to grab. His wife was carrying their six-year-old daughter, their eldest was running alongside them. His wife’s sister was walking ahead, with the couple’s eight-month-old son in her arms.

The first bomb killed his sister-in-law instantly. The baby was badly injured – but alive.

“I ran and carried him… But he died while we were waiting for the bombing to stop.”

Nisar* had also made it to the riverbank by about 17:00, having decided to escape with his mother, wife, son, daughter and sister. “We heard drones overhead and then the loud sound of an explosion,” he recalls. “We were all thrown to the ground. They dropped bombs on us using drones.”

Nisar was the only one of his family to survive.

Fayaz, his wife and daughters escaped and would eventually make it across the river. Despite his pleas, the boatman refused to allow Fayaz to bring the baby’s body with them. “He said there was no point in carrying the dead, so I dug a hole by the river bank and hastily buried him.”

Now they’re all in the relative safety of Bangladesh, but if they are caught by authorities here they could be sent back. Nisar clutches a Quran, unable still to process how his world was shattered in a single day.

“If I’d known what would happen, I would never have tried to leave that day,” Nisar says.

It is notoriously difficult to piece together what is happening in Myanmar’s civil war. But the BBC has managed to construct a picture of what happened on the evening of 5 August through a series of exclusive interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya survivors who escaped to Bangladesh, and the videos they shared.

All of the survivors – unarmed Rohingya civilians – recount hearing many bombs exploding over a period of two hours. While most described the bombs being dropped by drones, a weapon increasingly being used in Myanmar, some said they were hit by mortars and gunfire. The MSF clinic operating in Bangladesh has said it saw a big surge in wounded Rohingya in the days that followed – half of the injured were women and children.

Survivors’ videos analysed by BBC Verify show the river bank covered in bloodied bodies, many of them women and children. There’s no verified count of the number of people killed, but multiple eyewitnesses have told the BBC they saw scores of bodies.Rohingya civilians ‘bombed using dornes’

Survivors told us they were attacked by the Arakan Army, one of the strongest insurgent groups in Myanmar which in recent months has driven the military out of nearly all of Rakhine State. They said they were first attacked in their villages, forcing them to flee, and then were attacked again by the river bank as they sought to escape.

The AA declined to be interviewed but its spokesman Khaing Tukha denied the accusation and responded to the BBC’s questions with a statement which said “the incident did not occur in areas controlled by us”. He also accused Rohingya activists of staging the massacre and falsely accusing the AA.

Nisar stands by his account, however.

“The Arakan Army are lying,” he says. “The attacks were done by them. It was only them in our area on that day. And they have been attacking us for weeks. They don’t want to leave any Muslim alive.”

Most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims live as a minority in Rakhine – a Buddhist-majority state, where the two communities have long had a fraught relationship. In 2017, when the Myanmar military killed thousands of Rohingyas in what the UN described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”, local Rakhine men also joined the attacks. Now, amid a spiralling conflict between the junta and the AA, which has strong support in the ethnic Rakhine population, Rohingyas once again find themselves trapped.

Despite the risk of being caught and returned to Myanmar by the Bangladeshi authorities, Rohingya survivors told the BBC they wished to share details of the violence they faced so it would not go undocumented, especially as it unfolded in an area that is no longer accessible to rights groups or journalists.

“My heart is broken. Now, I’ve lost everything. I don’t know why I survived,” Nisar says.

A wealthy Rohingya trader, he sold his land and house as the shelling increased near his home in Rakhine. But the conflict intensified faster than he expected, and on the morning of 5 August, the family decided to leave Myanmar.

He is crying as he points to his daughter’s body in one of the videos: “My daughter died in my arms saying Allah’s name. She looks so peaceful, like she’s sleeping. She loved me so much.”

In the same video, he also points to his wife and sister, both severely injured but alive when the video was filmed. He could not carry them out as bombs were still falling, so he made the agonising choice to leave them behind. He found out later they had died.

“There was nowhere left that was safe, so we ran to the river to cross over to Bangladesh,” Fayaz says. The gunfire and bombs had followed them from village to village, and so Fayaz gave all his money to a boatman to carry them across the river.

Devastated and angry, he holds up a photo of his son’s bloodied body.

“If the Arakan Army didn’t fire at us, then who did?” he asks. “The direction that the bombs came from, I know the Arakan Army was there. Or was it thunder falling from the sky?”

These accusations raise serious questions about the Arakan Army, which describes itself as a revolutionary movement representing all the people of Rakhine.