On a humid afternoon in Jaruliachhari village, 17-year-old Nurul Absar balanced on a pair of wooden crutches outside his bamboo hut. Just a year earlier, he was sprinting across the scrub hills that straddle the Bangladesh–Myanmar border, ferrying cattle for smugglers. Then came the click of metal beneath his foot, a flash, and the blast that tore off his right leg.
“I thought I was dead,” Absar said quietly. “Now I live because of these sticks.”
He is one of at least 16 villagers in Bangladesh’s Bandarban district who have been mutilated by landmines in the past three years, according to Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) records and local tallies. Ten of those casualties occurred in the first eight months of this year alone, a surge that security officials describe as alarming — and one that reflects a conflict next door spilling silently across the frontier.
The landmines are not of Bangladesh’s making. Officers and local administrators say the devices are laid by Myanmar’s military and allied militias, who for years have used mines in their battles with ethnic armed groups. Most are buried just inside Myanmar’s territory, but Bangladeshi villagers, chasing quick money in cattle runs or contraband hauls, are the ones who trigger them.
“Most of these explosions occur a few hundred yards over the border line,” said Lt Col SKM Kofil Uddin Kayes, who commands BGB Battalion-11. “But the victims are our citizens. They go there for cattle, for drugs. They come back broken for life.”
In last August, a wild elephant wandering near the Naikhongchhari border triggered a landmine and has since been struggling for survival deep inside the Dariyardighi protected forest in Ramu. According to Md Nurul Islam, divisional officer of Cox’s Bazar South Forest Division, the wounded animal was last tracked there by local rangers.
By the time the forest department team reached the jungle to administer treatment, the elephant was already severely weakened from blood loss and dehydration, with veterinarians warning it would need prolonged intensive care. The case highlights how Myanmar’s landmines pose a grave threat not only to human lives along the border but also to Bangladesh’s vulnerable wildlife.
The peril extends far beyond the hills. In July 2024, three young men waded into the Naf River near Teknaf to catch crabs. When they crossed into Myanmar waters at Laldia Char, the mud erupted beneath them.
Nineteen-year-old Md Zubair lost his right leg below the knee and bled to death before his family could get him to any healthcare service. His two companions, also Rohingya, drifted back across the river, their bodies shredded by shrapnel. They survived, barely.
All three were second generation Rohingyas whose families had lived for decades outside official refugee camps, eking out lives on strips of forest land. With no papers and no steady work, even a day’s catch of crabs could mean survival.
Myanmar’s military has long denied laying mines indiscriminately. But international watchdogs have accused the country for years of sowing fields and riverbanks with explosives.
The Landmine Monitor’s 2024 report concluded that Myanmar has continued to deploy antipersonnel mines despite publicly endorsing annual United Nations resolutions in support of a global ban. Use of mines, the report said, spiked sharply in 2023 and 2024.
Photographs reviewed by the Monitor, a Switzerland-based group that tracks compliance with the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions, show mines manufactured in Myanmar being seized from army units by non-state armed groups almost every month between early 2022 and late 2024, across nearly every region of the country. In August 2023, the military was even reported to have made the devices deadlier by burying mortar rounds beneath them.
Bangladesh has long positioned itself as a committed member of the Mine Ban Treaty, signing in 1998, ratifying in 2000, and destroying its entire stockpile of 189,227 antipersonnel mines by the 2005 deadline.
The government maintains it has never produced, exported, or deployed mines inside its territory, and Bangladeshi officials have played active roles in treaty oversight, including co-chairing the Standing Committee on Stockpile Destruction. Yet the country’s borderlands tell a more troubling story.
Security forces in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, particularly around Naikhongchhari, have repeatedly recovered Burmese-made mines and explosives from rebel hideouts, with at least 81 antipersonnel and 36 antivehicle mines seized between 2004 and 2006.
While Dhaka insists its forces are not laying mines, the presence of foreign stockpiles—and the injuries now afflicting civilians and even wildlife—underscore how porous the border remains. For Bangladesh, the danger is no longer about compliance, but about containing a threat flowing in from across Myanmar.
No mechanism exists between Dhaka and Naypyidaw to mark or clear contaminated areas. That leaves civilians — Bangladeshis and Rohingya alike — to stumble blind into danger.
The mines are only part of a border that has become a fault line of illicit trade. Bangladeshi police estimate that 250 million methamphetamine tablets are smuggled in from Myanmar each year, most through Bandarban and Cox’s Bazar districts. For decades, the same routes carried cattle.
This summer, BGB rolled out armoured personnel carriers to patrol the frontier. Several notorious traffickers — including a man known only as “Shahin Dakat,” or bandit Shahin — were arrested in August. But villagers say the real profiteers remain untouched.
“The godfathers who send us never come to the hospital,” said Abdullah, 32, a double amputee from Gorjania. “We are the ones who pay.”
In villages like Gorjania and Jaruliachhari, young men in their twenties sit idly on plastic chairs or hobble with sticks. A few are still children. Most dropped out of school to chase fast cash in smuggling runs. Now they live on charity or tiny stipends, their futures severed with their limbs.
BGB has launched an awareness campaign branded in the local dialect: Oikka Boma Phode, Arre Ar Na Jaim — “Step on a mine, and you’re finished.” Posters line village roads. Booklets are distributed in schools. Loudspeakers blast warnings at dawn.
The campaign has had an effect. No new casualties were reported in September. But officials admit the effort is a stopgap.
“The problem is structural,” said Muhammad Mazharul Islam Chowdhury, Upazila Nirbahi Officer (UNO) of Naikhongchhari. “With few schools, few jobs, and low literacy, people still see smuggling as their only chance.”
As evening fell in Jaruliachhari, Absar leaned on his crutches and stared at the stump of his missing leg.
“They told me never to go again,” he said. “But I don’t need to be told. One step was enough to sabotage my life.”
