COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh (AP/Anadolu) – A massive fire raced through a crammed refugee camp for Rohingya Muslims in southern Bangladesh on Sunday, leaving thousands homeless, a fire official and the United Nations said.
No casualties were reported immediately at Balukhali camp in Cox’s Bazar district, said Emdadul Haque, a fire service official.
The UNHCR in Bangladesh said in a tweet that Rohingya refugee volunteers were responding to the fire with the agency and its partners providing support. It provided no further details.
The fire hit Camp 11 in Cox’s Bazar, a border district which hosts more than a million Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled military crackdown in Myanmar in 2017.
A police official said the cause of the blaze was not clear, but it is likely because of gas cylinders used for cooking. The fire spread quickly as most of the homes are made of bamboo and tarpaulin.
The Armed Police Battalion, the force in charge of maintaining law and order in the refugee camps, said in a statement that nearly 2,000 tents were gutted and 12,000 Rohingya left homeless.
“The Rohingya would be shifted to different camp-based learning centers and other shelters under the supervision of Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office, and donor agencies including the UNHCR and World Food Program will provide them food and other support,” said the statement.
Similar fires occurred at the camps in January 2022 and March 2021. While the blaze last year only damaged homes, the one in 2021 killed 15 community members and destroyed over 10,000 settlements.
More than 1 million Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar over several decades, including about 740,000 who crossed the border starting in August 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a brutal crackdown.
Conditions in Myanmar have worsened since a military takeover in 2021, and attempts to send them back have failed.
Last year, the United States said the oppression of Rohingya in Myanmar amounts to genocide after U.S. authorities confirmed accounts of mass atrocities against civilians by the military in a systematic campaign against the ethnic minority. Muslim Rohingya face widespread discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where most are denied citizenship and many other rights.