Marium Khatun, 40, was feeding her 10-month-old son at home when she first saw the fire and smoke nearby. Realising a huge blaze was ripping through the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp just metres from her two-room shack, she panicked.
“I suddenly noticed people were running, scattered on the road in front of my house. I came to the door and saw this huge fire around 30 metres (100ft) away from my house. I couldn’t think straight.
“I grabbed my son and started running in a different direction,” Khatun said. Her husband and four other children were not home at the time, so she was alone with her baby as she tried to escape the walls of flame.
The fire tore through several camps in the Balukhali area on Monday afternoon and burned into the night, killing at least 15 people, including three children. At least 400 people were still missing on Tuesday and the UNHCR said about 45,000 people had been displaced by the fire.
Khatun was one of them. Her home, made from bamboo and tarpaulin, was claimed by the blaze as she fled.
“Suddenly the fire was everywhere. Whichever direction I ran, the fire was blocking our path. I was thinking about my husband, my other four children who were out playing, and I thought ‘this is it, we all are gonna die today’.”
“At some point I was at a safe distance and I don’t remember how I went there with my child. But all I could think about then was the rest of my family. I was crying and screaming. I had no way to contact them. I was in shock. I thought I’ve lost them.”
Eventually, Khatun was found by a relative and taken to safety.
“One of my nephews found me in the crowd and he brought me to my sister’s house. I was able to call my husband. He was fine, but he also had no clue about my children. I was so worried, I felt I was dying.”
After a few hours, her children arrived at her sister’s house and the family was reunited, but their home is gone. On Tuesday she returned to the patch of ground where the shack had stood and her children sifted through the rubble to see if there was anything to salvage.
“We’ve lost everything once in Myanmar. We came to Bangladesh and started over. Now I’ve lost everything once again. I just grabbed my son and fled the fire. I couldn’t have the time to fetch anything else. I don’t know what will we do now.”
Khatun and her family have borrowed bamboos and a tarpaulin from her relatives and made a makeshift tent to sleep in. Her sister brought cooked food for them and they have received a carton full of provisions from the World Food Programme. “We always relied on the Bangladeshi government and the aid agencies. We’re still counting on them,” Khatun said.
Bangladeshi authorities and the UNHCR are rushing to provide critical support and protection to 45,000 Rohingya refugees who lost their shelters and belongings in the blaze.
‘God knows how many of them couldn’t flee’
Mohammad Selim, 38, rushed to the scene when the fire broke out. The blaze was moving too fast for people to take anything with them as they ran, he said.
“It was just chaos. People were just panicking. They were running for their lives. The fire spread so quickly that people hardly could fetch their belongings.”
“God knows how many of them couldn’t flee the fire at all,” Selim said.
The loss of human lives and properties would’ve been much worse if the fire took hold at night, Selim said.
“Thankfully it started during the day and everyone could act quickly. Everyone rushed there and was trying to douse the fire. Very soon the fire department arrived. Refugees and volunteers joined forces with the fire department, police and army. But the wind was so unfavourable it took hours to finally bring the fire under control.” he said.
Bangladesh has sheltered more than a million Rohingya Muslims in crowded refugee camps, the vast majority having fled neighbouring Myanmar in 2017 amid a major crackdown by that country’s military. The UN has said the crackdown had a genocidal intent, a charge Myanmar rejects.
The huge fire comes just months ahead of Bangladesh’s monsoon season, when cyclones and heavy rains between June and October batter the region and often lead to floods.