Elephants destroy Rohingya tents in Bangladesh refugee camp

One of the world's largest refugee camps, Kutupalong in the coastal town of Cox's Bazar, has fallen prey to elephant attacks that have caused a dozen deaths over the past six months. The camp is home to 700,000 Rohingya who have fled a brutal campaign of violence in Myanmar. The area around Kutupalong, a natural habitat for elephants, lies on a migration route used by the animals to move between Bangladesh and Myanmar in search of food and shelter. A response programme orchestrated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature aims to warn residents when an elephant enters the camp
Fatal elephant attacks on Rohingya refugees push Bangladesh to act.


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Wild elephants rampage through Rohingya refugee camp

Up to 12 people have been killed as wild elephants continue to rampage through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Twelve Rohingya people have been killed by wild elephants in a refugee camp in Bangladesh over recent months.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh since a military crackdown last year.

The United Nations has said the military crackdown could constitute as an "act of genocide".

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For Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution, elephants pose a new threat

As refugee camps in Bangladesh expand into wildlife habitats, a dozen people have been killed by elephants.

When the tarpaulin she was sleeping under started rustling furiously in the darkness, Mustaba Khatun thought it was thieves cutting their way into her shelter on the edges of Bangladesh’s Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp, where the city of bamboo and plastic meets the forest.

“We thought someone had come to take our supplies so we rushed outside and that’s when we saw the elephant. Then it charged at us,” she recalled of the night in September 2017, only weeks after she fled a Myanmar military operation that killed an estimated 6,700 Rohingya Muslims.

A child and an adult were killed in that nocturnal chaos, and the community was left with a new fear to live with after a harrowing escape from alleged “systematic killings and rape.” One of Khatun’s neighbors, his own leg still bandaged from falling over as he bolted from the scene, keeps a grisly photo of the aftermath on his phone. Soon afterward, the child’s mourning family decided to move deeper into the camp. Those remaining on the edges formed night watches, monitoring the hills and rallying the neighbors to chase away any elephants that wandered in.

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