🧵Some crucial pieces of work were released today on Arakan Army...

🧵Some crucial pieces of work were released today on Arakan Army abuses against the Rohingya community.
A detailed report by @FortifyRights specifically addresses and provides credible eyewitness accounts that answer almost all the outstanding questions.
fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-2024-0…

@FortifyRights Questions regarding the massacre that took place in the first week of August to the West of Maungdaw.

A broader @CrisisGroup report also came out looking at the general impact of the Arakan Army's takeover on local governance across Arakan/Rakhine state.
crisisgroup.org/asia/south-eas…

Regarding the murder of scores of Rohingya civilians along the river, the questions were:
- How was direction of fire determined?
- Were these mortar strikes or drone-bombs?
- Could this be mistaken targeting or was it a deliberate massacre?
Fortify's investigation answers these.

"Suddenly, a drone came from Shwe Zar [AA-controlled territory]. I don’t know what it looked at, but it returned [to its base]. Then, a few other drones came and began dropping bombs on us. Those drones came from the Shwe Zar side."

This quote answers most of those questions.
- The drones were explicitly seen coming from a direction (vs assumed)
- There were both drone-dropped bombs and artillery
- There was close-enough surveillance that there would be no doubt that this crowd was 100s/1000s of civilians.

This report demonstrates, with several credible eye-witnesses, that a crowd of Rohingya civilians who had fled from clashes in downtown Maungdaw were closely surveilled by drones belonging to the Arakan Army, before being attacked by drones and mortars, killing scores/100s.

Furthermore, it establishes the presence of several RSO militants with the crowd. This begins to explain why this illegal & heinous massacre escalated from the AA's previous atrocities (that did not reach this threshold of systematic violence).

In case there was any question, the systematic and deliberate targeting of a crowd that was in the presence of armed militia-members IS a war crime, and there can be NO legitimate justification for it.

These eye-witness accounts also disprove several of the claims in 'preliminary report' issues by the ULA that claimed (incredulously) that the AA was not using drones in Maungdaw at that time, with further quotes that misrepresent the effect of junta drone jammers.