Several front-ranking leaders of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), including its kingpin Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi are in fact paid agents of Myanmar military junta and been on monthly payroll, with the main assignment of sabotaging return of Rohingyas to Myanmar. With this mission, Jununi and other key members of ARSA are targeting and killing pro-repatriation Rohingya leaders inside Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. These lapdogs of Myanmar military junta also are running campaign with the goal of convincing Rohingyas to give up their decades-old demand of getting legal status in Myanmar. In addition to paying monthly stipend, Myanmar’s military junta is helping members of ARSA in running illegal Yaba trade, while Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi alone gets 20 percent of the total income generated from drug trade. With this income, Jununi has purchased properties in Pakistan and also has established two medium-range industrial projects in Pakistan’s Karachi province.
It may be mentioned here that Ataullah Jununi was born in Karachi, Pakistan to a migrant family, who had fled the religious persecution in his native Rakhine State in Myanmar (also known as Arakan, Burma) sometime in the 1960s, At an early age, Ataullah’s family moved to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where he was enrolled in a madrassa. In his later years in Mecca, Ataullah served as an imam to the Rohingya diaspora community of around 150,000. According to think-tanks Ataullah Jununi and several members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) maintains deeper connections with Afghan drug lords, while they also enjoy discreet relations with Buddhist leaders in Myanmar as well as officials of Myanmar’s intelligence agency.
Although Myanmar authorities are aware of the fact that Ataullah spent six months training in modern guerilla warfare under the Taliban in Pakistan; they succeeded in hiring him and few other key figures in ARSA by giving them offer of huge financial benefit. It is even learnt that the Myanmar military junta has allocated a large land to Ataullah Jununi, where he currently is running a Yaba manufacturing factory.
Earlier, International Crisis Group said, Ataullah Jununi had received advanced military training in Libya. Before his return to Rakhine State.
ARSA leaders implement Myanmar regime’s secret plot
For years Myanmar authorities were trying to find an excuse of driving-away Rohingyas from their homes in Rakhine State, as they wanted to lease out these lands to mineral exploration companies and large investors from foreign countries. As part of this conspiracy, several secret meetings took place between ARSA members, led by Ataullah Jununi during March to August 2016. Subsequently, as per directives from the Myanmar military junta, Ataullah Jununi led hundreds of ARSA members on October 9, 2016 to Bangladesh-Myanmar border and started attacking Burmese border police posts. A week later, Ataullah appeared in a video online, claiming responsibility for the attacks, which had given justification to Myanmar’s army in starting massive crackdown on Rohingya populace. It is even learnt from a credible source that during Myanmar army’s cruel crackdown on Rohingyas, masked members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) were busy in looting cash, ornaments and valuables from Rohingya homes, while they also joined Burmese army and Buddhists in gang rapes.
Also read Myanmar military junta arms, patronizes ARSA
Following October 9, 2016 attacks targeting Myanmar’s border police posts, nine months later, on August 25, 2017, Atauttah Jununi led Kha Maung Seik massacre, killing 99 Burmese Hindus.
Ataullah’s half-brother Muhammad Shah Ali, a member of ARSA, was arrested by the Armed Police Battalion on January 16, 2022 in a camp near Cox’s Bazar while carrying arms and drugs.
Ataullah Jununi was accused by Bangladesh Police in an investigative report submitted in June 2022 of ordering the murder of Rohingya leader Mohib Ullah because he feared his and his organization Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights’s popularity, which he believed could be an impediment in ARSA’s agenda. The police also stated that Ataullah Jununi had told Mohib Ullah to shut down the operations of his organization and join ARSA, but he refused.
Cruelty of ARSA on Rohingyas and Hindus
Amnesty International in its report dated May 22, 2018 said:
A Rohingya armed group [Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army – ARSA] brandishing guns and swords is responsible for at least one, and potentially a second, massacre of up to 99 Hindu women, men, and children as well as additional unlawful killings and abductions of Hindu villagers in August 2017, Amnesty International revealed today after carrying out a detailed investigation inside Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
Based on dozens of interviews conducted there and across the border in Bangladesh, as well as photographic evidence analyzed by forensic pathologists, the organization revealed how Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters sowed fear among Hindus and other ethnic communities with these brutal attacks.
“Our latest investigation on the ground sheds much-needed light on the largely under-reported human rights abuses by ARSA during northern Rakhine State’s unspeakably dark recent history,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International.
“It’s hard to ignore the sheer brutality of ARSA’s actions, which have left an indelible impression on the survivors we’ve spoken to. Accountability for these atrocities is every bit as crucial as it is for the crimes against humanity carried out by Myanmar’s security forces in northern Rakhine State.”
Massacre in Kha Maung Seik
At around 8am on 25 August 2017, ARSA attacked the Hindu community in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik, in a cluster of villages known as Kha Maung Seik in northern Maungdaw Township. At the time of the attack, the Hindu villagers lived in close proximity to Rohingya villagers, who are predominantly Muslim. Rakhine villagers, who are predominantly Buddhist, also lived in the same area.
Armed men dressed in black and local Rohingya villagers in plain clothes rounded up dozens of Hindu women, men and children. They robbed, bound, and blindfolded them before marching them to the outskirts of the village, where they separated the men from the women and young children. A few hours later, the ARSA fighters killed 53 of the Hindus, execution-style, starting with the men.
Eight Hindu women and eight of their children were abducted and spared, after ARSA fighters forced the women to agree to “convert” to Islam. The survivors were forced to flee with the fighters to Bangladesh several days later, before being repatriated to Myanmar in October 2017 with the support of the Bangladeshi and Myanmar authorities.
Bina Bala, a 22-year-old woman who survived the massacre, told Amnesty International:
“[The men] held knives and long iron rods. They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us. I asked what they were doing. One of them replied, ‘You and Rakhine are the same, you have a different religion, you can’t live here. He spoke the [Rohingya] language. They asked what belongings we had, then they beat us. Eventually I gave them my gold and money”.
All eight survivors interviewed by Amnesty International said they either saw Hindu relatives being killed or heard their screams. Raj Kumari, 18, said: “They slaughtered the men. We were told not to look at them … They had knives. They also had some spades and iron rods. … We hid ourselves in the shrubs there and were able to see a little … My uncle, my father, my brother – they were all slaughtered”.
Formila, around 20, told Amnesty International that she did not see when the Hindu men were killed, but that the fighters “came back with blood on their swords, and blood on their hands” and told the women the men had been killed. Later, as Formila and the other seven abducted women were being marched away, she turned back and saw ARSA fighters kill the other women and children. “I saw men holding the heads and hair [of the women] and others were holding knives. And then they cut their throats”, she said.
According to a detailed list of the dead, given to Amnesty International, the victims from Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik include 20 men, 10 women, and 23 children, 14 of whom were under the age of eight. This is consistent with multiple testimonies the organization gathered in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, from survivors and witnesses as well as Hindu community leaders.
Unfortunately, majority of those who had written extensively on Rohingya issue did not utter a word about massacre on Hindus in Kha Maung Seik by the notorious members of ARSA. Even most of the eminent research groups did not touch this issue. On April 5, 2018, an article published by the Gatestone Institute said:
The persecution of Muslims in Myanmar has been condemned by Western policymakers, international human rights organizations and the United Nations for the past year. Since August alone, more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape atrocities committed against them by the Burmese army.
During the same period, however, more than 100,000 Hindu Rohingyas have also sought refuge in Bangladesh, but for a different reason: to escape the brutality of the members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Muslim terrorist outfit fighting against the Myanmar government.
The plight of these Hindus has received little media coverage: the authorities in Bangladesh have been hesitant to report that many of them have refused to be placed in refugee camps with Muslim Rohingyas, some of whom were among the perpetrators of crimes against them back at home in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. These crimes include the slaughter of Hindu boys and men, and the mass rape of Hindu girls and women — brutal practices that are going on to this day in Myanmar.
What this writer of Gatestone Institute article too did not mention is – massacre in Kha Maung Seik and extreme atrocities on Hindus by the members of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
