When Faizul* fled the smouldering remains of his village in Myanmar’s Northern Rakhine state, he barely noticed the shards of wood that punctured every extremity of his body. He just wanted to escape the bullets raining down from a helicopter above. But by the time he reached Bangladesh, a shrapnel wound on his right leg had grown to the size of a golf ball, and its yellow flesh was festering with signs of an infection.Two weeks later and the bacteria still threatens to invade deeper into his weakened body. He may have reached a refugee camp, but Faizul still cannot access professional healthcare.”I am moving house to house every day, as it is illegal for me to be here,” he says while beads of perspiration crawl down his face.The attack on Yay Khaw Chaung Khwa Sone village, where Faizul lived with his pregnant wife and two-year-old child, came in retaliation for the death of a column commander in an ambush by Rohingya fighters a day earlier, as reported by the Center for Diversity and National Harmony (CDNH), an independent non-governmental organisation in Myanmar that has been monitoring and recording such incidents in regular reports. “The military came into the village and whoever was in front of them, they started killing. Four people were shot while running away with me. I saw it with my own eyes,” says Faizul, who also claims to have seen a number of other atrocities.
Source: Rohingya in Rakhine state suffer government retaliation – News from Al Jazeera
