Along the main road that stretches nearly 40km north from Maungdaw town in Myanmar's violence-riven Rakhine State, all but one of the villages that were once home to tens of thousands of people have been turned into smouldering ash.
Hundreds of cows roam through deserted settlements and charred paddy fields. Hungry dogs eat small goats. The remains of local mosques, markets and schools – once bustling with Rohingya Muslims – are silent.
Nearly 500 people have been killed and 480,000 Rohingya have fled since August 25, when attacks on 30 police posts and a military base by Muslim militants provoked a fierce army crackdown. The government has rejected allegations of arson, rape and arbitrary killings levelled against its security forces.
Residents of his village said it had been burned down by security forces in an earlier operation against Rohingya insurgents late last year. Those that did not flee have been surviving since in makeshift shacks, eating food distributed by aid agencies.
Satellite photos showed that tens of thousands of homes in northern Rakhine have been destroyed in 214 villages, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. The UN detected 20sqkm of destroyed structures.
Food running low
Little aid has made it to northern Rakhine since the UN had to suspend operations because of the fighting and after the government suggested its food was sustaining insurgents. Convoys organised by the Red Cross have twice been stopped and searched by hostile ethnic Rakhines in the state capital Sittwe.
In U Shey Kya, where last October Rohingya residents accused the Myanmar army of raping several women, a teacher who spoke to Reuters from the village by phone said only about 100 families out of 800 households have stayed behind.
Those who remain are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the soldiers, who come to the village in the morning prompting the residents to hide in the forest and return at night.
"We don't even have food to eat for this evening. What can we do?" said the teacher. "We are close to the forest where we have leaves we can eat and find some water to survive." He refused to give his name because he had been warned by the authorities not to talk to reporters.
'Happy they're gone now'
The damage caused by the fires, Reuters interviews and satellite pictures show, is by far the largest in Maungdaw, where the bulk of insurgent attacks took place. Across the mostly coastal area, stretching more than 100km through thick bush and monsoon-swollen streams, most villages have been burned.
"Those who stored food, sold it and raised money to flee to Bangladesh," Mohammad Salem, 35, who used to sell cosmetics at the market, told Reuters by phone from the town.
Tin Tun Soe, a Rakhine administrator in Chein Khar Li, where a security post had come under attack, said the army response was rapid and all the Rohingya had been driven out. Nearly 1,600 houses were burned down a day after the attacks, he said, though he blamed the fires on the insurgents.
"They have so many people. If they are here, we're afraid to live," said Tin Tun Soe. "I am very happy that now all of them are gone."
