Myanmar’s military killed seven of my children, says Rohingya refugee who fled village

Noor Ayesha held her last surviving daughter tight as their boat crossed into Bangladeshi waters. She left behind a firebombed home, a dead husband, seven slain children and the soldiers who raped her. “A group of about 20 of them appeared in front of my house,” the 40-year-old Rohingya woman recalled of the morning in mid-October when her village was invaded by hundreds of Myanmar government troops.

“They ordered all of us to come out in the courtyard. They separated five of our children and forced them into one of our rooms and put on the latch from outside. Then they fired a ‘gun-bomb’ on that room and set it on fire.

“Five of my children were burnt to death by the soldiers. They killed my two daughters after raping them. They also killed my husband and raped me.”

She said just one child survived the frenzy: five-year-old Dilnawaz Begum, who hid in a neighbour’s house when the soldiers arrived in the village of Kyet Yoe Pyin, in the Maungdaw township of Rakhine state.

Ayesha’s account is one of a wave of reports of extrajudicial killing, arson and sexual assaults allegedly committed by soldiers in the north-west of the country.