Myanmar’s Rakhine State could fall within months to rebels

Thousands of Myanmar ­security forces have sought refuge in Bangladesh, sevens years after Rohingya fled a murderous military operation.

captured Myanmar soldiers and their families in Buthidaung Township, Rakhine State. Picture: Arakan Army

Seven years after Rohingya Muslims fled a murderous military operation in Rakhine State for the relative safety of Bangladesh, Myanmar soldiers are streaming over the same border to escape a powerful ethnic army now within striking distance of seizing the strategically vital Indian Ocean enclave.

Thousands of Myanmar ­security forces have sought refuge in Bangladesh since February, providing some of the most totemic images of a civil conflict that has firmly turned against the military junta that provoked it with its February 2021 coup.

Hundreds continue to shelter inside the Bangladesh border, in housing built as staging posts for the planned repatriation of more than a million Rohingya refugees who crossed into Cox’s Bazaar to escape successive Myanmar ­military pogroms.

With this month’s capture of Thandwe International Airport and Ngapali beach – a prized tourist drawcard on Rakhine’s southern border with ­Bangladesh – regional analysts believe the state could fall within months.

Myanmar independent consultant and long-time analyst David Mathieson predicted earlier this month, in an article for the Lowy Interpreter, that Rakhine State could be in the hands of the Arakan Army before the end of the year.

He told The Australian the ethnic armed group – one of three operating under the Brotherhood Alliance banner responsible for last October’s Operation 1027 in northern Shan State, which turned the tide of the conflict against the regime – were already the “de facto controllers” of Rakhine following a series of stunning military victories.

The loss of the resource-rich state – which would be the first full Myanmar province to fall – would be crippling to the already stuttering regime economy.

Along with a lucrative coastal tourist strip, and one of the military’s most important naval bases, it is to host an $US8bn ($11.96bn) Chinese-funded deep-sea port and overland oil and gas pipeline stretching all the way to Kunming in China.

Crisis Group Myanmar ­adviser Richard Horsey said the fall of Rakhine State, an ­enclave on the Indian Ocean, would have “considerable geopolitical ramifications beyond the impact on the Myanmar ­regime and the integrity of any future Myanmar state”.

“The Indian Ocean is a zone of considerable geopolitical competition, between India and China and with broader US strategic interests,” Mr Horsey said.

“Rakhine is a pivotal part of that – both India and China have deepwater port developments – and it’s the start of a major ­Chinese energy corridor (twin gas and oil pipelines across Myanmar from Kyaukpyu to Kunming).”

Yet the capture of Rakhine State could be a Pyrrhic victory if the junta regime responded as it did to other strategic losses in areas of northern Shan and Chin States – by pulverising towns and civilian populations with air strikes, warned Mathieson.

The Arakan Army, itself ­responsible for crimes against Rakhine’s Rohingya Muslim minority in 2012 and 2017, resumed its 15-year armed resistance last November, ending a year-long ceasefire with the junta.

Should it seize control of the state, it would also inherit responsibility for the administration of close to a million stateless ­Rohingya, disenfranchised by successive Burmese Buddhist majority regimes.

Mr Horsey said the Arakan Army had been working to “reset” relations with Rohingya communities since May, when its soldiers were accused of burning Rohingya villages in retribution for two armed Rohingya groups joining forces with the regime.

While several thousand Rohingya fighters have joined their former tormentors, Mr Horsey said many had been forcibly recruited from Bangladesh refugee camps, where Rohingya mothers in recent weeks, had formed night patrols and “mob-attacked” militant recruiters.