How a Rohingya massacre unfolded at Tula Toli

DISCARDED and left for dead, Mumtaz says she found herself on top of a mound of charred, entangled bodies.

“They killed and killed and piled the bodies up high. It was like cut bamboo,” says Mumtaz, a Rohingya woman from the village of Tula Toli in western Myanmar.

“In the pile, there was someone’s neck, someone’s head, someone’s leg. I was able to come out, I don’t know how.”

The horrors Mumtaz says she endured didn’t stop there. After escaping the mass grave, Mumtaz says she was dragged to a village house and raped by soldiers. The wooden house was then locked and set on fire.

It was her seven-year-old daughter Razia, who was in the hut, that ultimately saved her.

“I called to my mum. And my mum said, ‘who are you?'” Razia says. “My mother’s head was split. She was thrown aside. They struck me and threw me aside.”

“I said ‘your finger is on fire.’ Then my mum and I got out and left.”

The pair squeezed through a damaged part of a fence and hid in a vegetable patch, before other villagers found them and helped them get to Bangladesh, where a staggering 615,000 Rohingya refugees have fled since August 25, according to aid agencies.

The refugees have escaped violent clashes in the north of Rakhine State, where Myanmar’s military has intensified what it calls “clearance operations” targeting “terrorists” after Rohingya militants attacked police posts, killing 12 security officials.

The UN calls what’s happening in Rakhine a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and the killings that took place in Mumtaz’s village on August 30 have been described as one of the worst atrocities of the past two and a half months.

Shafiur Rahman, a Bangladeshi-British documentary maker, first heard about what occurred at Tula Toli after he filmed a group of Rohingya crossing the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh on September 2, three days after the killings.

The dramatic footage shows dozens of men and women clambering across barbed wire fences into no man’s land, some of them covered in blood and carrying dead or injured relatives. Their distress is palpable.

“It quickly became clear to me that those telling me the most horrific accounts of their last few days were those coming from Tula Toli,” Rahman tells CNN. “And what also struck me was the consistency in their stories.”