The Rohingya population in Myanmar were stripped of their citizenship rights decades ago. And now, due to the ongoing conflict, they have also been robbed of their ability to move. This leaves them trapped when government agents show up to forcibly conscript them into a losing war. A story that is tragically repeated for hundreds of Rohingya men in both Myanmar and Bangladesh forcibly conscripted into a battle that isn’t theirs and that, regardless of the outcome of the war, they cannot win. This is the story of Abdullah*, as reported in the Guardian.

“Thrown into the battlefield as human shields.”

Abdullah was asleep when soldiers came to his home in the middle of the night brandishing guns. They forced him into a truck where he waited in the dark for four hours, watching as the soldiers entered the homes of his neighbors, forcibly pulling out 30 more young men from their homes to join him. Abdullah had spent the last two weeks trying desperately to hide from the military after he heard rumors about forced conscription. But sadly, morning found Abdullah and the other forced conscripts at an army base with a commander telling them they would be trained for 10 days, then taken into battle and ordered to fight.

Looking around the base Abdullah said:

“I saw lots of dead bodies at the base and if the soldiers who had training for six months were being killed in fighting, how could we fight the rebels after just 10 days of training? It was impossible. I was sure we would die fighting,”

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