To his foes, Ata Ullah is a reckless amateur who has brought untold misery to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya after launching an insurgency in Myanmar. But to supporters of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, their leader is an intrepid fighter who left a life of luxury in Saudi Arabia to defend the stateless group against overwhelming odds. “He’s very charismatic,” Richard Horsey, an independent analyst based in Myanmar, told AFP. “He inspires people. He speaks in a way that resonates with the grievances felt by that community.” Ullah is believed to have ordered the deadly attacks by ARSA in Myanmar’s Rakhine state last month, provoking a ferocious offensive by security forces that has sent around 420,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. He first came to public attention last October when he announced his group’s arrival in videos posted online after launching deadly ambushes on Myanmar border posts in Rakhine state, long a hotbed of religious tensions between Muslims and Buddhists. Multiple sources close to the leader told AFP that Ullah is in his early 30s and appears to oversee a rag-tag network of cells comprising lightly trained men armed with sticks, machetes and a small number of guns. In the videos, flanked by masked gunmen and dressed in casual attire, Ullah lists the crimes committed against the Rohingya by the Myanmar government, and promises to liberate the community from “dehumanised oppression”. The vast majority of the world’s Rohingya community have been stateless for decades, eking out hardscrabble lives in ghettos in Myanmar or overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. But Ullah was raised in a middle class home in the sprawling Pakistani port city of Karachi. His father studied at the esteemed Darul-Uloom madrassas in Karachi before moving the family to Saudi Arabia to teach in Riyadh then later Ta’if, according to a relative interviewed by AFP. There Ullah recited the Koran at a mosque where he caught the attention of wealthy Saudis who asked him to tutor their children. He was soon brought into the group’s inner circle, enjoying late-night parties and lavish hunting trips. “The Saudis liked him a lot and treated him like one of their own,” a relative of the Ullah family with knowledge of their time in Saudi Arabia told AFP. But after the 2012 communal rioting in Rakhine that displaced over 140,000 mostly Rohingya, Ullah abandoned his comfortable life in Saudi Arabia to go back to Myanmar and fight. First, he returned to Pakistan with millions of dollars seeking guns, fighters and training from top jihadist groups, according to militants in Karachi who met him during the trip. Three figures from militant circles who met Ullah in 2012 in Karachi said money was sent to him via traditional Islamic hawala transactions, an informal system of payments based on trust that is far more difficult to trace than bank transfers. The sources added that they assumed the funds came from wealthy Saudis and Rohingya in Saudi Arabia. He contacted figures tied to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and Kashmiri separatist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, offering them large sums of cash in exchange for help, to no avail. “Publicly, these organisations had expressed their solidarity with the Muslims of Burma and called for jihad but they gave him the cold shoulder,” said one source who collaborated with Ullah in 2012, using Myanmar’s former name. Published in Daily Times, September 23rd 2017.