Rohingya mother Sofura Begum has spent years in a squalid refugee camp after fleeing Myanmar. Now her teenage son has been taken to fight alongside the troops that put her there. Militant Rohingya groups in Bangladesh have forcibly recruited hundreds of young Rohingya men and boys to battle the Arakan Army, a rebel outfit in neighbouring Myanmar that has won a string of victories against the junta there. Those sent to fight are making common cause with the military that drove 750,000 members of the persecuted Muslim minority from their homes and into Bangladesh in a 2017 crackdown now the subject of an ongoing UN genocide court case. In their recruitment drive, militants say Rohingya need to ally with old enemies in the Myanmar army to face a new threat. But the families of those dragooned into combat say that their relatives were not given a choice. “They told us to hand him over,” Begum, 30, told AFP after her 15-year-old son Abdul was picked up by armed men from her home. “They threatened us… They said it’s our war of faith. I didn’t want my son to join the war. But we are in a dangerous situation.” AFP spoke with six families who said men from their household had been forcibly recruited by three Rohingya armed groups with an established presence in the refugee camps. One man, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said his 20-year-old son had been taken by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and sent across the border to fight. “I learned that he was injured in the war,” the man said. “It’s shameful my son was forcibly recruited… Every day our people are being picked up.” – ‘Slaughtered our people’ – Myanmar’s military has lost vast swathes of territory this year to an advance by the Arakan Army, one of several rebel groups battling the junta that took power in a 2021 coup. The Arakan Army says it is fighting for more autonomy for the ethnic Rakhine population in the state, which is also home to around 600,000 Rohingya who remained after the 2017 crackdown. This month the rebel outfit took control of Buthidaung, a Rohingya-majority town not far from Bangladesh.