ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army)

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), previously known as Harakah al-Yaqin ("Faith Movement"), is an armed group claiming to defend the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar's Rakhine State. It first drew international attention in October 2016 when it attacked Border Guard Police posts in northern Rakhine, killing nine officers. A larger, coordinated assault on 25 August 2017 against roughly 30 police posts and an army base prompted "clearance operations" by the Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) that the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (2018 report, A/HRC/39/64) concluded were carried out with "genocidal intent."

Those operations drove more than 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar district within weeks, creating one of the world's largest refugee settlements at Kutupalong. The Myanmar government designated ARSA a terrorist organisation under its Counter-Terrorism Law on 25 August 2017. Bangladesh has also blamed ARSA for violence inside the refugee camps, including the September 2021 assassination of prominent Rohingya community leader Mohib Ullah.

ARSA's stated leader is Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi, a Rohingya reportedly born in Karachi and raised in Saudi Arabia. The group has publicly denied links to transnational jihadist movements, framing itself as an ethno-nationalist defence force, though the International Crisis Group's December 2016 briefing documented training and funding ties to Rohingya diaspora networks in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

For MUN and IR researchers, ARSA is central to debates on:

• The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine and its non-application in Myanmar.
• The Gambia v. Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice (filed November 2019) under the Genocide Convention.
• Refugee protection obligations under customary international law, given Bangladesh is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
• The distinction between proportionate counter-insurgency and collective punishment of civilian populations.