Turkey hands out winter aid to Rohingya in Bangladesh

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AA) – Turkey’s state aid agency on Sunday finished handing out blankets to 5,000 Rohingya families in Bangladesh's refugee camps on the eve of the arrival of winter.

“As part of our winter gifts to the Rohingya Muslims we have completed distribution of blankets to 5,000 Rohingya families. We will continue our support to the persecuted refugees throughout the whole winter season, which will hit Bangladesh in full swing starting in mid-December,” Ismail Gundogdu, Bangladesh coordinator for the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), told Anadolu Agency.

The winter season could hit the Rohingya refugees in southeastern Bangladesh hard, according to refugees and locals.

Gundogdu added: “Since the very beginning of the Rohingya crisis in massive form following the August 2017 exodus, TIKA has been actively working to support the stateless people.”

Last week TIKA also completed a five-day distribution of food items among 5,000 Rohingya families in the camps.

TIKA was founded in 1992 and today has offices in 60 countries. The agency opened an office in Bangladesh in 2014 and has carried out hundreds of projects since then.

This September, the agency distributed 5,000 packages of dry food items among the Rohingya in Bangladesh's southern district of Cox’s Bazar.

Several times this year it also distributed healthcare items and food packages among Rohingya refugees.

Through 2019, TIKA had distributed hot meals to approximately 25,000 Rohingya refugees on a daily basis since Aug. 25, 2017 brutal military clampdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State that forced more than 750,000 Rohingya refugees, mostly women and children, to flee Myanmar and cross into Bangladesh, pushing the number of persecuted people in Bangladesh above 1.2 million.

- Persecuted people

Since Aug. 25, 2017, nearly 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed by Myanmar’s state forces, according to a report by the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA).

More than 34,000 Rohingya were also thrown into fires, while over 114,000 others were beaten, said the OIDA report, entitled Forced Migration of Rohingya: The Untold Experience.

As many as 18,000 Rohingya women and girls were raped by Myanmar’s army and police and over 115,000 Rohingya homes burned down, while 113,000 others were vandalized, it added.