Rohingya women, girls being trafficked to Malaysia for marriage

Al Jazeera reveals how refugees in Bangladesh camps are vulnerable to proposals from single Rohingya men in Malaysia.

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Senwara Begum travelled for two weeks by road and boat, over mountains and along rivers, guided only by a trafficker she feared, before she reached Malaysia to marry a man she had never met.

The journey was a blur of borders and landscapes unknown to her and it started in Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps, where she was born 23 years earlier and where there is increasing concern about the number of young women and girls being smuggled across borders to marry Rohingya men abroad.

The Kutupalong settlement in Cox’s Bazar, from where the women are plucked, grew into the world’s largest refugee site in 2017, after a Myanmar military operation described as “genocidal” by the UN targeted the majority-Muslim minority.

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