COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh (AFP) — Rohingya refugee Syed fled Myanmar for a second time last month, after he was forced to fight alongside the military that drove his family out of their homeland years earlier.

Syed, whose name has been changed to protect him from reprisals, is one of thousands of young men from the stateless and persecuted Muslim minority rounded up to wage a war not of their own making.

Their conscription into the ranks of junta-run Myanmar’s military has prompted revenge attacks against civilians and pushed thousands more into Bangladesh, already host to around a million Rohingya refugees.

“The people there are suffering a lot. I saw that with my own eyes,” Syed told AFP, soon after his escape and return to the squalid Bangladeshi relief camp he has called home for the past seven years.

“Some are starving, they are dying of hunger,” the 23-year-old added. “Everyone else is busy trying to save their own lives.”

Syed said he was conscripted by a Rohingya armed group operating in the camps in June and sent to fight against the Arakan Army, a rebel group waging war against Myanmar’s junta to carve out its own autonomous homeland.

He and other Rohingya recruits were put to work as porters, digging ditches and fetching water for Myanmar troops as they bunkered in against advancing rebel troops.