Rohingya Crisis: Babies Chopped in Half, Mothers and Daughters Gang Raped

Buddhist, Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy recently traveled to Bangladesh and spoke with dozens of the Rohingya Muslim refugees who were among the estimated 700,000 who fled genocidal violence committed by the Myanmar government last year and are now sharing the horrors that innocent families have faced.

Sixteen members of the recently founded Faith Coalition to End Genocide in Burma (also known as Myanmar) took part in the multi-day trip to learn more about the dire situation and spread awareness within their spheres of influence in the United States.

The United Nations estimates that over 670,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh from the Rakhine state since August 2017, when Burmese military forces attacked and destroyed their jungle villages, killed thousands of men and babies and systematically gang-raped the women.

Muslim imam Malik Mujahid, one of the coalition's organizers, told The Christian Post on Thursday that there are still as many as 500 to 600 Rohingya refugees per week who are making their way to Bangladeshi refugee camps in the border town of Cox's Bazar.

Although the refugees are living in small huts held up by thin strips of bamboo, have to bathe in water pumps, and have a lack of access to jobs, money, education and medicine, they, at the very least, feel safe in their new temporary living situations.

"I asked people multiple times why they came," Mujahid said, adding that he and the coalition members spoke with over 60 refugees at five different camps.

"They said, 'Well, they shot us.' In some cases, the village chair told them to leave or they heard that neighboring villages are being attacked. Women say that their neighbors were raped, so they left."

As the government in the majority-Buddhist nation has worked for years to strip the citizenship and rights away from the indigenous Rohingya community, trip attendee Nicolee Ambrose told CP that the military onslaught against the Rohingya community that began last August was simply "the final stage" of a mission to eradicate the minority from their ancestral homelands.

"The Burmese military clearly viewed that there would not be repercussions if they did this and they did it," Ambrose said.

What the government troops did, Ambrose said, was systematically surround Rohingya villages in their ancestral homeland and attack.

Ambrose said that many of the stories she heard were similar. In most situations, the military would go into the village, kill all the men, separate the women and brutalize them.

On separate occasions she was told of how the Rohingya women would be split up into groups of five or six and gang-raped by as many as 10 different men.

According to Ambrose, the U.N.'s figures show that about 52 percent of the women who survived also reported having been raped.

Ambrose, a Christian who serves as the Republican National Committeewoman for Maryland, recently wrote about her experiences in Bangladesh.

She told the story of one refugee child named Moriom, whom she said was dressed in a Princess Aurora-like pink dress when she met her. Despite the child's innocence, Ambrose would later learn that the 13 year old had been gang-raped along with her mother by 10 men.

Read more about the Rohingya crisis on The Christian Post.