Summary Around 30,000 Rakhine Buddhists, Hindus have also been displaced
YANGON: (AFP) - A military campaign to wipe out Rohingya insurgents has rained violence down on Myanmar s Rakhine state, sending nearly 390,000 Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing for sanctuary in Bangladesh.
Around 30,000 Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus have also been displaced, as ethnic and religious hatreds carve through the state.
Access to the epicentre of unrest -- the northern wedge of Rakhine -- has been blocked by the government as the crisis unfolds.
But the weary and wounded Rohingya arriving in Bangladesh have told consistent but unverifiable accounts of village massacres, with soldiers and vigilante mobs teaming up to empty out communities and burn them to the ground.
The UN has accused Myanmar of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, a stateless group that the Buddhist-majority country refuses to recognise as citizens.
The government refutes the accusations, instead saying the army has carried out targeted operations to snuff out the militant group, whose attacks on police posts in late August unleashed the massive military response.
Here is what we know about who is left in violence-ravaged Rakhine, where tens of thousands of people are believed to still be on the move.
Empty villages
A 2012 count said three million people lived in Rakhine, including an estimated 1.1 million Rohingya.
Rakhine s northernmost Maungdaw district was home to around three quarters of that population, according to government figures.
But nearly forty percent of its Rohingya villages have been completely abandoned in the past three weeks, said government spokesman Zaw Htay.
"There are 176 villages where the whole village fled," he told reporters Wednesday night, out of 471 Rohingya communities in total.
The recent refugee arrivals in Bangladesh amount to more than a third of the total number of Rohinyga once based in Myanmar.
The ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus also driven from their homes by the violence say they were targeted by the Rohingya militants.
Zaw Htay urged internally displaced people to take refuge in temporary camps set up in Rakhine.
But he said the country would not allow all of those who crossed into Bangladesh to return, comments that will fuel allegations Myanmar is intentionally ejecting the Rohingya, whose presence in Myanmar has incensed powerful Buddhist nationalists for years.
"Some reached the other side of border. If they come back, we cannot accept all of them," Zaw Htay said, adding that returnees would need to be "scrutinised".
