Mohammed Amin used to measure his days in small, solvable problems: a faulty water pump on a boat; a customer needing the right sprocket for a motorbike; a neighbor asking him to sort out wiring for a solar panel. In Maungdaw, the 29-year-old Rohingya shopkeeper was the son who took over the family business so his younger siblings could stay in school. He rode a motorbike between his two shops and the cattle yard, saving a little each month and spending more on tutors. The future, if not secure, was at least imaginable.
By early August 2024, that future had been pushed to the edge of the sea. As the Arakan Army (AA) pressed its offensive across northern Rakhine, drones began to buzz over Rohingya wards already emptied by shelling and warnings. On August 5, Amin joined hundreds of families at Fayazipara beach, waiting for boats across the Naf River. He remembers first the sound – “dung, dung” – and then the shock of metal tearing flesh. In minutes, shrapnel had cut down his parents, sisters, son, and one brother. When he eventually crossed into Bangladesh, it took doctors hours to safely remove the shrapnel fragments from Amin’s body and stitch up the wounds.
Through the night after the attack, two brothers, Amin and Muhammad Anis, stayed on the shore. At first light on August 6, a boatman took them not across to Bangladesh but to Jaliardiya island. There, Amin says, men identifying with a Rohingya armed group robbed and beat them. He pleaded for help for his brother; none came. By around 5 p.m., Anis was dead.
This photo story moves with Amin: from his densely packed shop to the motorbike he rode between errands; to the beach where the crowd scattered on that deadly day; to the camp in Cox’s Bazar where they removed shrapnel from various parts of his body. The images track a life interrupted rather than an abstraction called “the Rohingya crisis.” They show the textures that get lost in policy language: the quiet pride of an elder brother, a man documenting the deaths of his parents and his son, the tightness of bandage tape under hospital light.
Amin’s testimony is not an isolated cry. In July 2025, Fortify Rights urged the International Criminal Court to investigate AA abuses against Rohingya civilians, citing evidence of “abductions, torture, killings and beheadings” in areas under AA control. The organization named the August 5 massacre near the Naf River – the very attack Amin survived – as part of a wider pattern. Survivors described detention sites where men were shackled, beaten, and, in some cases, found decapitated; families recounted night-time seizures and bodies left in fields. Fortify Rights’ call is blunt: the AA “should be investigated” for grave breaches of the laws of war.
Amin says the drones that attacked the beach came from AA-held ground. People shouted warnings – “Mogh Baghi! (Rakhine rebels!)” – as the blasts fell; later that day, he saw men he believed were AA soldiers in captured Border Guard Police uniforms. He is careful with what he claims and direct about what he saw.
He also knows what cannot be undone.
Today, in Camp 27 in Cox’s Bazar, Amin and his wife and brother rent a single room; no shelter kit came with their registration. The food voucher is enough to eat, not to rebuild. After surgery in Cox’s Bazar, he and his wife now go for check-ups only when needed. The wounds have closed; the losses haven’t. There is no counseling program; neighbors do what they can. He never speaks about repatriation to the place that took his family. He asks for resettlement and a chance to work legally, study, and build a life that isn’t temporary.
These photographs, provided by Amin, do not resolve who will answer for August 5. They do something smaller and harder. If accountability comes, as Rohingya insist it must, it will hinge on stories like Amin’s, told plainly and seen clearly. Here is the man he was, the place he stood, the sky he looked up at, and the life that remains.
