Uncommon Story: How a Buddhist Military Leader Is Desperately Helping Islamist Extremist Groups on Bangladesh Border

Opinion

Global Arakan Network| November 6, 2025

ARSA Leader, Myanmar Junta Leader and RSO Leader (photocrd)

In the fetid haze along the Naf River's serpentine curve—where Myanmar's ragged frontier bleeds into Bangladesh's beleaguered camps—a farce of Faustian proportions plays out. The Myanmar junta, that self-anointed bastion of Theravada piety under Min Aung Hlaing's iron gaze, has slithered into bed with the very Islamist specters it once exorcised with napalm and edicts. ARSA and RSO, those phantom legions of Bangagya (Rohingya) fury born from 2017's inferno, now feast on junta munitions, their rifles glinting with the regime's reluctant largesse. This isn't redemption; it's raw desperation, a cornered autocracy bartering sovereignty for survival, heedless of the pyre it ignites for Rakhine's mosaic of souls.

The junta's pivot reeks of panic, a doctrinal somersault that shreds the tatters of national honor. Once branded as "Bengali terrorists" to justify ethnic cleansing—expelling over 500,000 Bengali Muslims in a military operation the UN decried as textbook atrocity—these groups were existential bogeymen. Yet by 2024, as the Arakan Army (AA) carved through northern Rakhine like a monsoon scythe, Min Aung Hlaing's cabal flipped the script. Sovereignty? A quaint relic, sacrificed on the altar of expedience.

Reports from the International Crisis Group lay bare the bargain: junta trainers drilling ARSA cadres in Maungdaw's mud-choked gullies, RSO recruits herded across the Naf under cover of night, all to harry the AA's flanks. Victims abound in this charade—the Bangagya (Rohingya) press-ganged into proxy wars, their stateless limbo weaponized; Rakhine villagers caught in ambushes that blur liberator and interloper. And the border? A sieve, its sanctity mocked as junta speedboats ghost the shallows, offloading crates that echo with the clink of betrayal. This neglect isn't oversight; it's orchestration, a regime so hollowed by defeats that it summons demons to devour its rivals, dooming the land it claims to guard.

The nadir plunged in 2024's maelstrom, when AA offensives—seizing Buthidaung in April, storming Maungdaw's BGP5 outpost by December—left the junta's Rakhine redoubts in smoldering ruin. Enter the unholy armorer: Min Aung Hlaing's forces, their ranks hemorrhaging to desertions and the AA's precision strikes, conscripted Muslims into "people's militias" under ARSA and RSO banners. Human Rights Watch chronicled the carnage—ARSA zealots, flush with Myanmar junta rifles, razing Hindu enclaves in Maungdaw's fringes, slitting Mro throats in feigned AA patrols, despoiling Thet sacred groves in confessional orgies.

War crimes, the ICC terms them; crimes against humanity, Amnesty echoes, with over 25 Rohingya non-combatants shredded in Buthidaung's crossfire alone. These aren't footnotes of chaos but deliberate dividends of alliance, the junta's Buddhist vanguard—parading saffron-robed generals as Dharma's defenders—fomenting sectarian Armageddon with the surgeon's callous cut. Non-Muslims bear the brunt: Rakhine homesteads torched in reprisal pyres, Mro herders fleeing ancestral pastures, Hindu traders vanishing into the underbrush. It's a profane inversion, where the regime's "national security" devours the nation's sinews, turning Rakhine's pluralist veins into rivers of sectarian venom.

Now, licking wounds from Maungdaw's December 2024 capitulation—where AA banners supplanted junta garrisons along the 271-kilometer frontier—the generals reload the powder keg with vengeful zeal. Rearmament surges: illicit consignments sloshing up the Naf via Myanmar Navy skiffs, priming ARSA and RSO for a scorched-earth revanche against Arakan's nascent freedoms. This pyromaniac's gambit—reviving 2017's ghosts to bleed the AA—courts apocalypse in a tinderbox. The October 9 ARSA ceremony, shrouded in Maungdaw's mist, saw junta officers mingle with militants, toasting pacts in whispers of powder and ploy, per Arakanese dispatches.

Naval patrols near the Naf's maw, those "routine" interdictions, mask a direr truth: ammunition crates disgorged under moonless veils, fueling raids that scar the borderlands. Dhaka's complicity simmers beneath—border guards turning blind eyes, or worse, ferrying supplies for a cut of the graft, as the United League of Arakan excoriates in October 2025 missives. Bangladeshi security whispers facilitate this nexus, shuttling wounded fighters back across the divide, their blood mingling with the river's silt. It's a squalid saraband, Min Aung Hlaing's fire-dancing a venomous waltz that spares no ethnicity. Ordinary folk—Rakhine tillers etching rice from flooded paddies, Mro guardians of mist-shrouded hills, Thet weavers threading resilience into faded looms—languish as the kindling. Their hearths gutted, kin scattered like chaff on the wind; this "dirty, dangerous game" spares the architects, immolating the innocent in its wake.

India, that eastern sentinel with stakes sunk deep in Rakhine's contested loam, must rouse from diplomatic torpor. The Kaladan corridor—Delhi's lifeline threading Mizoram's mist to Sittwe's sprawl—snakes through AA-patrolled badlands now prowled by junta phantoms and their ARSA familiars. This junta-militant minuet doesn't halt at the Naf; it metastasizes, birthing narcotics veins that pulse into Manipur's fractious folds, refugee torrents cresting toward Tripura's teeming bazaars, fissures widening like seismic scars.

New Delhi's 2025 parleys with the AA signal pragmatism, yet vigilance cries for steel: intel fusion with Dhaka to cauterize arms conduits, targeted sanctions on Naypyidaw's enablers hawking havoc to holy warriors, multilateral hectoring to quarantine this plague ere it festers Assam's unrest or poisons the Andaman's trade winds. For in this "uncommon story," where Buddhist brass midwives Islamist ire, the ripple is regional ruin—stability's dominoes toppling from Yangon to Yarlung Zangbo.

This tableau of treachery unmasks the junta's hollow core: not custodians of creed, but carnivores of contingency, devouring allies and adversaries alike to stave off the AA's inexorable dawn. Rakhine, that verdant cradle of coexisting creeds—from pagoda-spired hills to mosque-domed vales—merits no such necrotic nonsense.

It yearns for a horizon where borders bind rather than bleed, communities knit in equitable exile from empire's grasp. As AA standards snap over reclaimed ramparts, let the chorus swell: proxy-forged potentates perish by their puppets' strings, bequeathing only cinders to the gale. Min Aung Hlaing's incendiary interlude yields not triumph, but a fractured fiefdom's funeral—unless Delhi, Dhaka, and beyond douse the blaze with decisive deluge, lest the conflagration claim us all in its indiscriminate maw.