At least two people were killed in a village in Bangladesh on Monday by mortar shells fired from neighboring Burma. The police said this was an spillover of the border fighting raging in this country.
There have been frequent clashes in parts of Burma near the 270 km border with Bangladesh since November, when Arakan Army (AA) fighters ended a ceasefire that had been largely observed since the 2021 coup.
“The two people were killed by gunfire in Jalpaitoli village at around 2:15 p.m. local time (8:15 a.m. GMT),” local police chief Abdul Mannan told AFP.
Police said a Bangladeshi woman, Hosne Ara, 48, and an unnamed Rohingya man were killed.
“They were sitting in their kitchen … when a mortar hit,” said Hosne Ara's daughter-in-law, who was too upset to give her name.
At the time of the incident, she was “serving lunch to the Rohingya who had been hired by the family to do agricultural work.”
Bangladesh Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Sunday that at least 14 border guards from Rakhine State in Burma had “entered” Bangladeshi territory “to protect themselves from the advance of AA rebels.”
The AA, made up of fighters from an ethnic minority, has been waging an intermittent war for years over the autonomy of the ethnic Rakhine population living near the border with Bangladesh.
A spokesman for Bangladesh's border guards told AFP on Monday that “at least 95 Myanmar border guards” had crossed the border to seek refuge “at Bangladeshi border posts.”
The non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Sunday that its doctors in the Bangladeshi port city of Cox's Bazar had “taken in a large number of injured people following fighting on the border.”
“All had gunshot wounds,” Doctors Without Borders said on Monday. “Two of them were in mortal danger and five were seriously injured.”
In October, an alliance of AA insurgents and other ethnic minority fighters launched a joint offensive in northern Burma and captured trading centers on the Chinese border.
In January, the military in power in Burma and three armed groups announced that they had reached a Beijing-brokered ceasefire agreement in the north of the country. However, this agreement does not apply to areas near the border with Bangladesh and India where fighting continues.
Bangladesh is already home to around a million Rohingya refugees who were forced out of Burma in a military crackdown in 2017.