Army slaughtered men, children

and our sons."

So many people were crammed into their house by then, though, that Habiba soon lost track of all but one child.

Outside, a soldier's voice rose above the others. It was Baju, and he was calling on everyone to come out, assuring them they would not be harmed. As the minutes passed and nobody emerged, the calls turned menacing, and the sergeant threatened to burn the compound to the ground.

Several bursts of gunfire rang out and a young boy was struck in the forehead. The women recoiled in horror as he lay motionless before them, the back of his skull blown apart.

Seconds later, soldiers broke down the doors and began dragging people out, separating the men from the women.

Mothers and elderly women were ordered onto their knees. Some tried to push back when troops ripped off their headscarves and tore at their clothes. The soldiers first demanded their cell phones, then grabbed at exposed breasts as they snatched gold earrings, necklaces and wads of cash.

About 20 or 25 of the women — mostly attractive and young — were taken away. They were never seen again. The rest eventually were driven, along with their children, into a pair of houses on the property.

The soldiers bound the men's hands behind their backs and ordered them into the dirt courtyard in front of the house, where they were forced face down onto the stifling ground. Most were blindfolded with masking tape or veils taken from the women. A handful who tried to resist were thrown off the balcony head-first.

Troops started to walk across the sea of people, grinding boots into their heads and beating them with rifle butts. Some of the soldiers cursed their prisoners, calling them dirty "kalar," a derogatory word for Muslims that is frequently used in Myanmar.

Duza's brother, Hossain, begged for the violence to stop.

"Why are you doing this?" he cried. "Why are you tying us up?" There was no answer. Around noon, a senior officer called a commander on his phone. The officer said they had rounded up 87 men. "What should we do with them?" The call ended shortly afterward, and the officer barked an order to his troops. "Let us begin." Duza watched through a slit in a closed window as a soldier plunged a long knife into his brother's neck in front of their house. When two of Hossain's sons got up and tried to run, soldiers opened fire.

Duza stepped back in shock. He scrambled to an upstairs room and crawled into the only place he could think of to hide: a foot-high space under a large wooden container normally used to store rice. He covered his legs with rice sacks and curled into a ball, trying to disappear.

Outside, screams like he'd never heard before reverberated across the courtyard.

Several soldiers hammered fourinch nails into the temples of three men on the ground with the butts of their rifles. Four other men were decapitated, including a prominent gray-bearded mullah.

Then a pair of soldiers — one was Baju — descended on Jamila's husband. With two-foot-long machetes, they hacked into his neck from both sides. He crumpled in the dirt, gagging on blood.

Gasping for breath, Jamila stumbled toward the door. She wanted to rush to his side, to help him, to be with him — to die.

But the women in the house pulled her back.

"You can't go," one said, as Jamila collapsed, weeping. "If you go out there, they'll kill all of us."

While women rocked back and forth, several children began praying. In the courtyard, they could hear people begging for their lives. "Please Allah!" Please help us!" "We're dying!" When Jamila rose to look out the window again, she saw her 16year-old son dragged away by the collar of his shirt and tied to a tree, screaming, "I didn't do anything!"

The gunshots rang out. Jamila could not bear to look.

As the afternoon wore on, the carnage became more methodical.

Men and teenage boys were taken away in small groups and killed by firing squads near a forested area on the edge of the property. In some cases, a soldier blew a whistle beforehand, signaling for them to begin.

Other troops wrapped corpses in orange and green tarps and transported them downhill in threewheeled push-carts to a pair of army trucks parked on the road. Several witnesses reported seeing soldiers digging pits and dumping bodies into them.

When Mohammad Nasir was marched to the killing ground with six others, he saw more than a dozen cadavers crumpled there under the trees. As those beside him braced for death and called out Islamic creeds — "There is no god but Allah! Mohamed is his prophet!" — Nasir wriggled loose and ran.

He made it to the far side of a small ravine before the first burst of gunfire rang out. Half an hour later, when he had run out of breath, he realized he had been shot in the elbow.

Mohammadul Hassan was taken to a pond just east of the main house. Soldiers ordered him to kneel with his two brothers, then shot them all from behind and rolled them over to make sure they were dead. When Hassan unexpectedly opened his eyes, an officer sitting on the bank walked casually forward and fired a single rifle shot into his chest. Hassan later regained consciousness, stumbled away, and survived.

That afternoon, soldiers began searching the compound for men. At one point, Baju grabbed Duza's 9-year-old son Mohamed Ahasun, and demanded to know where his father was.

The boy said Duza had left four days earlier for another village. Baju slapped him, but let him go.

In the tiny, darkened crawl space upstairs, Duza's mind had gone numb. He kept telling himself: "It has to stop ... This has to end somehow." Praying for survival, he waited for the soldiers to discover him, to drag him out by the feet.

But they never did. And when the guns finally fell silent, he crept slowly downstairs, and slipped away.

For the next two weeks, he traveled alone, joining the hordes of Rohingya bound for Bangladesh. They crossed streams and forests and mountains, and finally the Naf River, which separates the two countries.

When Duza got out of a boat and stepped onto Bangladeshi soil, he looked back toward Myanmar and saw half a dozen columns of smoke curling skyward from burning Rohingya homes. His family, he thought, was surely dead.

There is no way to independently confirm the death toll in Maung Nu. But one handwritten tally seen by The AP details the names, ages and professions of 82 people, most of them men and boys from Maung Nu and Hpaung Taw Pyin, who family members say were killed.

They are farmers and students, carpenters, businessmen and teachers. The youngest is seven years old; the oldest, 95.

According to Arof, the village administrator, at least 200 more remain missing and are feared dead.

Most of the survivors struggle to understand why so many of their neighbors were slaughtered. Arof said the army falsely believed they were supporting the insurgency, but something much deeper had driven the killing. The massacres reported since August have stood out for their high casualty toll, their ferocity, and the methodical way in which they were carried out.

"You have to understand ... they hate us," Arof said. "This didn't only happen in our village, it happened everywhere."

In the end, Duza was one of the luckiest survivors.

After weeks spent imagining another life without a family, he found a newly-arrived refugee with a Myanmar phone and asked to use it.

He dialled his wife Habiba's number. A young girl answered.

He could barely believe it. It was his 14-year-old daughter, Taslima.

As tears welled in his eyes, Duza asked about the rest of his family. "Are they with you? Are they alive?"

"Yes papa! Yes!" Taslima replied. "We're here! Everybody is fine."

Duza's family had been elsewhere in the compound when he fled. It would take them six more weeks to make the journey to Bangladesh.

When the family reunited in a refugee camp, Duza broke down as he hugged his wife and squeezed the children he never thought he'd see again. They had lost so much -- their friends and relatives, their home, their savings, their future -- but they had somehow found each other.

"It felt like living in another world," Duza said. "It felt like a new life."