Cox's Bazar district - 7 September 2017
1. Zahida Begum holding her son in her arm to whom she had given birth just hours ago
2. Various of Begum and her son
3. Begum with her mother Dildar Begum and her elder son in the room
4. Close of fire
5. SOUNDBITE (Rohingya dialect) Dildar Begum, Zahida's mother:
"The mother is starving from want of food, from where will the mother feed milk to her baby? I cannot provide medicine, I cannot manage any food to eat."
6. Various of Begum's husband Abdur Rahma feeding Zahida
7. SOUNDBITE (Rohingya dialect) Dildar Begum, Zahida's mother:
"They are killing us by shooting with bullets. It was intolerable to stay there anymore and we have escaped with whatever we could grab in our hands. Here we are dying from starvation and over there, there is only brutality. All these years we did not come here, we had been living there in peace."
8. Various of new makeshift Kutupalong refugee camp
9. A women trying to make a fire
10. A family building new tent
11. Exhausted young and elderly sleeping in the open
12. Unregistered old Kutupalong camp
13. Signboard of school inside old unregistered camp
14. Various of Rohingyas taking shelter in school
15. Family carrying their newly born twin babies in basket
16. Close of twin babies
17. New arrivals at camp
Rohingya refugees packed into camps and makeshift settlements in Bangladesh are becoming desperate for scant basic resources and dwindling supplies.
Fights are erupting over food and water. Women and children are rubbing their bellies and begging for food.
UN agencies estimate that more than a quarter-million Rohingya Muslims have flooded into the region in just the last two weeks.
Many were initially stunned and traumatised after fleeing violence that erupted Aug. 25 in Myanmar's Rakhine state.
They are now growing desperate in searching for food distribution points that appeared only in recent days, passing out packets of biscuits and 25-kilogramme (55-pound) bags of rice.
In a corner of a room in a sprawling expanse of squalid shanties and tents, Zahida Begum holds in her arms the tiny boy she gave birth to just hours ago.
Her eyes are blank.
The 25-year-old ethnic Rohingya Muslim crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar on Sept. 1 with her two young sons, husband and mother, fleeing shootings and arson attacks by Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist monks, her family says.
Having spent all their money on smugglers who helped them cross the Naf river to safety, she now sits afraid and unsure of what will come next.
The massive Kutupalong refugee camp of tiny mud houses covered with plastic sheets, with its overpowering stench of rotting food and feces, is now her home.
She gave birth alone, in the toilet outside the room, says her mother, Dildar Begum.
The baby has not been fed since his birth 10 hours ago.
She's feverish and shivers so much that her mother lit a small, smoky fire to warm her up.
She is still bleeding from the birth.
No doctor is in sight in the camp, set up in the early 1990s to accommodate earlier waves of Muslim Rohingya refugees escaping from convulsions of violence and persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
There are no clinics or pharmacies or even basic first aid centres.
On Friday afternoon, two infants were interred in the cemetery that has grown on the edge of the camp.
A 6-day-old baby, born on the road as his family escaped, was buried next to a 2-day-old child born to a long-time resident of the camp.
New arrivals like Begum and her family survive on the kindness of older refugees and on food handouts from local volunteers and aid groups: rice and curry once a day if they are lucky.
"She's been crying from hunger," her mother said of her weak and ailing daughter.
Begum simply stares.
Myanmar's government refuses to recognise Rohingya as a minority group and denies them citizenship, even though about 1 million were living there until two weeks ago and many families had been there for generations.
The exodus of Rohingya like Begum into neighbouring Bangladesh is massive in scale.
The United Nations says 270,000 have crossed over since Aug. 25.
With the influx pushing existing Rohingya refugee camps like this one to the brink, Bangladesh has pledged to build at least one more.
But it's unclear when that will happen.
The International Organization for Migration has pleaded for 18 million US dollars in donations to help feed and shelter tens of thousands now packed into makeshift settlements or stranded in a no-man's land between the two countries' borders.
In the Kutupalong camp, reporters saw several newly arrived children burning with high fevers.
At the Cox's Bazar district government hospital, four Rohingya men with gunshot wounds described Myanmar soldiers entering their villages and randomly opening fire.
The hospital said it was treating 31 other men with gunshot wounds.
Myanmar's government has denied any abuses by its troops and instead says it is fighting "terrorists".
It says a group of Rohingya insurgents and villagers themselves set fire to their own homes in Rakhine state.
It offers no explanation of why an already miserable and impoverished group of people would destroy their own homes and exhaust their meagre savings to take treacherous journeys to an unknown land for a life of extreme uncertainty.
