Rohingya insurgency has links outside Myanmar

Twenty leaders have overseas ties, says NGO

YANGON // A group of Rohingya Muslims who killed nine Myanmar border guards on October 9 is headed by people with links to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said yesterday.

A group calling itself Harakah Al Yakin had claimed responsibility for the attacks in video statements.

The Brussels-based ICG interviewed four members of Harakah Al Yakin in Rakhine and two outside Myanmar, as well as individuals in contact with members via messaging apps. The ICG then identified the group’s leader as being Ata Ullah, born in Karachi to a Rohingya migrant father before moving as a child to Mecca. “Though not confirmed, there are indications he went to Pakistan and possibly elsewhere, and that he received practical training in modern guerrilla warfare,” the group said, noting that Ata Ullah was one of 20 Rohingya from Saudi Arabia leading the group’s operations in Rakhine. A committee of 20 senior Rohingya émigrés oversees the group, which has its headquarters in Mecca, the ICG said.

Groups like ISIL and Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent have referred to the plight of the Rohingya in their material, and the battlefield experience of at least some of the Rohingya fighters implied links to international militants, the ICG said. The attack on the Myanmar border guards sparked a crackdown on the Muslim-majority Rakhine state in the country’s north-west in which at least 86 people have reportedly been killed.

The United Nations estimated that 27,000 members of the Rohingya minority fled the violence by moving to neighbouring Bangladesh. Myanmar’s government blamed Rohingyas supported by foreign militants for the October attacks but had issued scant further information about the assailants it called “terrorists”.

Leader of group that killed border guards cited in investigation