It was still dark, early on a January morning in 2024, when Mohammad Ayas slipped out of the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and trekked deep into the forest, returning to the place he had fled in 2017. This time, however, he was not escaping the “raining bullets” that had killed his father – he was going back to train and fight against those responsible for his people’s bloody exodus from Myanmar.
Ayas, a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee who teaches Burmese to children in the camps, tells The Independent that he and thousands like him are now united in their struggle against the Myanmar military and others who stand in their way of “reclaiming their motherland”.
