Betrayal in the Borderlands: How ARSA and RSO's Proxy Assaults Undermine Myanmar People’s Fight Against Military Dictatorship

Aung Naing Lin, Opinion

Global Arakan Network October 15, 2025

ARSA and RSO Terrorists inside Bangladesh (photocrd)

In the fog-laden frontier of northern Maungdaw, where the Naf River murmurs secrets across borders, a sinister ambush on September 16, 2025, laid bare a chilling betrayal. At 4:12 p.m., Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) militants stormed the Arakan Army’s (AA) Point 601 Camp, a bastion straddling border pillars 56 and 57. The United League of Arakan (ULA), the AA’s political arm, reported the assault in a September 27 statement:

“Although some ARSA elements managed, on the following day, to briefly enter unused and damaged structures in the first perimeter of the camp, our counterattacks and defensive operations, reinforced by supporting units, forced all ARSA members to flee into Bangladesh and other areas inside Arakan by the fourth day.”

As AA pursued the retreating militants, smaller clashes flared, exposing a grim pattern of escalating cross-border attacks. These strikes, far from advancing the Rohingya (Bangagya) cause, fracture the heart of Myanmar’s revolution against the military junta, aligning ARSA and its ally, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), with the very tyranny they claim to oppose.

The AA, a linchpin of the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027, has wrested 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships from junta control since November 2023, galvanizing Myanmar’s broader fight against dictatorship. Yet, ARSA and RSO’s raids—surging in intensity along the Bangladesh border—divert AA resources, sap morale, and sow discord among communities yearning for unity.

RSO Terrorists in Myanmar Military Uniform (photocrd)

By late December 2025, these groups, under the so-called “Four Brothers Alliance” with lesser factions like the Arakan Rohingya Army, morphed into proxies for Bangladesh’s Border Guard (BGB). The ULA’s October 11 statement cuts through the haze:

“These corrupt BGB officers… assist by transporting injured or deceased ARSA members from conflict zones, providing medical treatment, supplying food and weapons, and offering leadership, security, aerial reconnaissance, and military intelligence through radar systems.”

This is no passive oversight; it’s active complicity. RSO operatives, posing as border sentinels, detain non-Muslim laborers—Rakhine traders, Mro farmers—eking out livings in Bangladesh’s frontier, their actions a grotesque mimicry of law enforcement. From Cox’s Bazar’s squalid camps, these groups train, arm, and plot, their camps a sanctuary under BGB’s blind eye, turning Bangladesh’s border into a springboard for chaos.

Worse still, the junta’s fingerprints stain this treachery. Seized ARSA and RSO arsenals—MA Series, RPGs, crates of ammunition—bear the junta’s markings, funneled through Navy officers in a bid to fracture resistance. The ULA’s October 11 missive is damning:

“Weapons… seized from ARSA and RSO indicate that these materials are likely being supplied or sold… by corrupt officials of the fascist terrorist Military Commission and certain extremist-supporting officers of the BGB… suggesting the possibility of a tripartite coordinated attack.”

This is the junta’s playbook: arm proxies to harass the AA, diverting focus from Sittwe’s frontlines to border skirmishes. The cost is visceral—civilian blood spilled in ambushes, like the six tortured bodies unearthed on September 28 near Point 601, or the October 11 killing of a Maungdaw taxi driver. These acts don’t liberate; they terrorize, alienating Rakhine and Bangagya alike, whose shared suffering under junta airstrikes demands solidarity, not division.

This proxy war is a dagger in the revolution’s side. Myanmar’s uprising—woven from Bamar protests, Karen defiance, and AA’s territorial strides—teeters on unity. ARSA and RSO’s attacks, abetted by junta munitions and BGB logistics, erode this cohesion, forcing AA to fight on two fronts while resistances bleed elsewhere.

Bangladesh, once a refuge for 2017’s Rohingya exodus, now abets the junta’s divide-and-rule gambit, its inaction—or worse, collusion—staining its role as a neighbor. The ULA’s pleas for Dhaka to curb these militants go unanswered, BGB’s denials hollow against evidence of smuggled arms and unchecked crossings.

The revolution’s survival hinges on excision: expose junta arms pipelines, pressure Bangladesh to dismantle militant camps, and rally Rakhine and Bangagya against shared tyranny. ARSA and RSO’s betrayal, cloaked in liberation’s guise, hands Naypyidaw a lifeline. As Maungdaw’s fields smolder, the clarion call is clear: dismantle the proxies, unite the front, and forge a Myanmar free from dictatorship’s shadow. The people’s fight demands nothing less.