CHITTAGONG: Nurses at the Bangladeshi hospital treating 16-year-old Rohingya refugee Mohammad Junaed for a bullet wound have had to tie him to his bed to stop him jumping out of it in pain whenever the morphine starts to wear off.
The traumatized teenager should be in intensive care after he was shot in the head allegedly by soldiers in his native Myanmar just days ago.
But his family, who fled the fighting across the border with little more than the clothes they were wearing, have no way of paying the fees.
“They (soldiers) shot him just above the eye and he is utterly traumatized. He is in enormous pain,” the boy’s father Mohammad Nabi told AFP at the Chittagong Medical College Hospital where he is being treated.
It is the only hospital in the area with the facilities to treat serious gunshot wounds and has been utterly overwhelmed since fresh violence broke out in Myanmar’s Rakhine state two weeks ago, triggering a flood of mostly Rohingya refugees across the border.
It quickly ran out of beds, leaving many of the 70 Rohingya refugees being treated there to find a space on the floor.
Two have died, several are in a critical condition — and more are arriving all the time.
Surgeon Kamal Uddin said resources at the hospital in the southern city of Chittagong, some 200 km north of the Myanmar border, were severely strained.
“We are battling to provide better treatment for these poor people, but they are critically injured and their fate remains uncertain,” he told AFP.
The UN says 270,000 Rohingya, a Muslim minority, have flooded into neighboring Bangladesh since deadly violence erupted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s Rakhine state two weeks ago.
Witnesses say entire villages have been burned since Rohingya militants launched a series of coordinated attacks on Aug. 25, prompting a military-led crackdown.
Junaed’s father Nabi, a 57-year-old widower from Maungdaw township, was separated from the rest of his six children when they fled, although he has since heard they all made it across the border.
The youngest, 14, was also shot and is being treated at one of the clinics near the border.
Bashir Ullah said he was shot in the leg by soldiers who burned dozens of houses in his village near Maungdaw in Rakhine, Myanmar’s poorest state.
“They started firing indiscriminately as we ran for our life. I fell on the ground and a bullet hit my leg,” Ullah told AFP as he cried out in pain.
“I am lucky. I was hit by bullets, but did not lose much blood.”
He said dozens of people from his village had been killed — a claim that AFP cannot independently verify, although it is clear that the recent fighting is the fiercest in Rakhine in years.
Myanmar’s government, led by Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has rejected allegations of atrocities and placed the blame for the violence squarely on the Rohingya militants.
Impoverished Bangladesh has been overwhelmed by the huge numbers of refugees flowing over the border, many of them sick or injured and all of them exhausted after the long and dangerous journey.
Hossain Jahur, 22, said troops came to his village in the middle of the night and dragged him and his family from their home.
“They beat and tortured us. At one stage I tried to flee, but a soldier threw a bomb at me. It blew off parts of my hand,” he said.
Despite his wounds, Jahur managed to walk to the border, and then on to the hospital in Chittagong for treatment.
But his long-term future is far from clear.
“The Myanmar army want to drive the Rohingya people out, even though our ancestors have lived there for centuries,” he said.
“We are like dogs to them.”
Wounded refugees overwhelm hospital in Bangladesh
Wounded refugees overwhelm hospital in Bangladesh
Pakistan says it struck militant hideouts along Afghan border after surge in deadly attacks
- Pakistan has seen a surge in militant violence in recent years, much of it blamed on the TTP and outlawed Baloch separatist groups
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan said early Sunday it carried out strikes along the border with Afghanistan, targeting hideouts of Pakistani militants it blames for recent attacks inside the country.
Islamabad did not say in precisely which areas the strikes were carried out or provide other details. There was no immediate comment from Kabul, and reports on social media suggested the strikes were carried out inside Afghanistan.
In comments before dawn Sunday, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X that the military conducted what he described as “intelligence-based, selective operations” against seven camps belonging to the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, and its affiliates. He said an affiliate of the Daesh group was also targeted in the border region.
In October, Pakistan also conducted strikes deep inside Afghanistan to target militant hideouts.
Tarar said Pakistan “has always strived to maintain peace and stability in the region,” but added that the safety and security of Pakistani citizens remained a top priority.
The latest development came days after a suicide bomber, backed by gunmen, rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the wall of a security post in Bajaur district in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. The blast caused part of the compound to collapse, killing 11 soldiers and a child, and authorities later said the attacker was an Afghan national.
Hours before the latest border strikes, another suicide bomber targeted a security convoy in the nearby Bannu district in the northwest, killing two soldiers, including a lieutenant colonel. After Saturday’s violence, Pakistan’s military had warned that it would not “exercise any restraint” and that operations against those responsible would continue “irrespective of their location,” language that suggested rising tensions between Islamabad and Kabul.
Tarar said Pakistan had “conclusive evidence” that the recent attacks , including a suicide bombing that targeted a Shiite mosque in Islamabad and killed 31 worshippers earlier this month, were carried out by militants acting on the “behest of their Afghanistan-based leadership and handlers.”
He said Pakistan had repeatedly urged Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to take verifiable steps to prevent militant groups from using Afghan territory to launch attacks in Pakistan, but alleged that no substantive action had been taken.
He said Pakistan urges the international community to press Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities to uphold their commitments under the Doha agreement not to allow their soil to be used against other countries.
Pakistan has seen a surge in militant violence in recent years, much of it blamed on the TTP and outlawed Baloch separatist groups. The TTP is separate from but closely allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban, who returned to power in 2021. Islamabad accuses the TTP of operating from inside Afghanistan, a charge both the group and Kabul deny.
Relations between the neighboring countries have remained tense since October, when deadly border clashes killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants. The violence followed explosions in Kabul that Afghan officials blamed on Pakistan.
A Qatar-mediated ceasefire has largely held, but talks in Istanbul failed to produce a formal agreement, and relations remain strained.
