‘Like an open prison’: a million Rohingya refugees still in Bangladesh camps five years after crisis

Life in the overcrowded Bangladesh refugee camps where a million Rohingya wait and hope. Photograph: Kaamil Ahmed

In the 31 years since Anuara Begum’s family moved into their bamboo shelter in the Nayapara refugee camp, the only improvement they could make was replacing its tarpaulin roof with tin sheeting – less flimsy but hammer-loud when the rains come.

Running from Myanmar’s military, their new home was built to be temporary, and so it proved when it took just 30 minutes for a fire last year to incinerate the metal and bamboo structures of a whole block of the camp.