TDS Desk:

Bangladesh has over the past 18 months registered the biggest influx of Rohingya refugees since the mass exodus of Myanmar’s largely Muslim minority nearly a decade ago, the United Nations said Friday.

The UN refugee agency said up to 1.5 lakh Rohingyas had arrived in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar refugee camps since early 2024.

“Targeted violence and persecution in Rakhine State and the ongoing conflict in Myanmar have continued to force thousands of Rohingya to seek protection in Bangladesh,” UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch told reporters in Geneva.

“This movement of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh, spread over months, is the largest from Myanmar since 2017, when some 750,000 fled the deadly violence in their native Rakhine State,” he said.

Baloch hailed Bangladesh for generously hosting Rohingya refugees for generations.

Even before the latest influx, around a million members of the persecuted and mostly Muslim Rohingya were living in squalid relief camps in Bangladesh, most of them after fleeing the 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar.

Those camps, crammed into just 24 square kilometres (nine square miles), have thus become “one of the world’s most densely populated places”, Baloch said.