KUTUPALONG: A fire destro-yed 2,000 shelters at a Rohingya refugee camp in south eastern Bangladesh on Sunday, leaving around 12,000 people homeless, an official said.

The fire broke out around 2:45pm (local time) at camp number 11 in Kutupalong, one of the world’s largest refugee settlements, and rapidly engulfed the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters, Mijanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner, told.

“Some 2,000 shelters have been burnt, leaving about 12,000 forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals shelter less,” he said.

At least 35 mosques and 21 learning centres for the refugees were also destroyed, though there were no reports of any injuries or deaths, he added.

“My shelter was gutted. (My shop) was also burnt,” said Mamun Johar, a 30-year-old Rohingya man.

2,000 refugee shelters destroyed at Cox’s Bazar

“The fire took everything from me, everything.” The blaze was brought under control in less than three hours.Earlier, the UNHCR in Bangladesh said in a tweet that Rohingya refugee volunteers were responding to the fire with the agency and its partners providing support.

“We currently don’t have an estimate for damages but there are no reports of casualties,” said Rafiqul Islam, additional police superintendent at Cox’s Bazar.

He added that the blaze was under control and senior officials from the fire, police and refugee relief departments were at the site. Faruque Ahmed, a local police official, said the cause of the fire was not clear.

“I couldn’t save anything. Everything burnt to ashes. Many are without homes. I don’t know what will happen to us,” said 40-year-old refugee Selim Ullah, a father of six children.

“When we were in Myanmar we faced lots of problems... our houses were burned down, he said. “Now it has happened again.”

It was not clear how the fire started. The authorities have ordered an investigation.

Fires are common in the camps where nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in squalid conditions.

Most of them fled a military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 and took refuge in Bangladesh.

A Bangladesh defence ministry report last month said that between January 2021 and December 2022, there were 222 fire incidents in the Rohingya camps — including 60 cases of arson.

In March 2021, in what was the worst blaze in the Rohingya camps, at least 15 people were killed and some 50,000 were displaced after a fire engulfed an entire block in a settlement.

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2023