A week or two ago, I received some videos created and distributed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). The purpose of the videos was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the coordinated attacks on three Myanmar border-police posts on 9 October 2016. It was carried out by Harakah al-Yaqin, the organisation subsequently renamed ARSA. The videos therefore commemorate ARSA’s first major operation.
At first I thought of uploading one of the videos to a Reddit group. The nerds there are good at identifying weaponry, and I was curious about the rifles carried by the ARSA men. But then I realised there was something more important to say about the videos.
If you view the video below, you will see in the opening sequences a physical banner that reads “Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) – Happy 9th October 2026.” Before that, the opening card calls this “Part-9,”making it part of a longer, multi-part production.
Video: ARSA video marking the tenth anniversary of the 9 October 2016 attacks. It is labelled “Part-9”, circulated in October 2026.
The “Happy 9th October” banner turns a profoundly consequential event into a simple story. Some sort of founding myth, if you like. The attack on the three border-police posts by ARSA’s precursor was used as a pretext by Myanmar’s military to launch its “clearance operations.” This resulted in killings, rapes and widespread village burnings. That drove circa 87,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh and displaced people internally too.
The ARSA attacks did not justify collective punishment or deportation into exile. Still, there are questions for ARSA to answer concerning what their strategies have led to. Ordinary Rohingya villagers bore the catastrophic costs in 2016. An armed group that claims to speak for a people owes them an explanation. The videos don’t even try.
Instead, they display their uniforms, weapons, flags, heroic poses and heavily geared-up commandos in the videos. Yes, it is rather theatrical. What you see is not really a military exercise. It is a military pageant dressed up as combat training and some sort of creation story.
ARSA’s message to their supporters and outsiders is clear. It is: We have survived. Not just that, we possess uniforms and weapons. Indeed, we are becoming a conventional-looking army. We have tactical commando gear rather than just being a bunch of poorly equipped people carrying bamboo sticks and machetes. We claim the 9th of October as a foundational political and military anniversary.
I have not watched all the videos, but I suspect there is no semblance of mourning and no acknowledgement of the 87,000 driven out. I strongly suspect also that there is no indication that the ordinary Rohingya whose lives were transformed had any voice in making 9 October a day of celebration. In fact, the tenth video is a speech by the current leader of ARSA, Ustad Khalid, and there is no reference to the above concerns anywhere in his speech. If I am mistaken, and if any reader has watched all the (tedious) videos, please let me know.
That odd silence definitely demands scrutiny. But ARSA’s video production invites another trap. Khalid tells us in the tenth video that Myanmar doesn’t supply them with arms. ARSA took them from captured AA bases. In this way, they want you to see a self-sufficient, disciplined army standing on its own two feet. The trouble is, plenty of analysts fall for this and analyse the group in total isolation. They are blind to the governments that have pulled its strings, looked the other way, or fed it into the meat grinder.
In a recent piece, former diplomat Laetitia van den Assum gives the Arakan Army the dignified language of statecraft. She describes it as an emerging administration but with a “delivery gap.” Meanwhile, Rohingya armed groups appear as attackers and mysteriously armed men crossing the border. Van den Assum explains the delivery gap as an outcome of war with the junta, airstrikes, floods and “attacks by Bangladesh-based Rohingya militias.” She never mentions the AA’s own conduct.
The Arakan Army controls the ground, but that does not make it a legitimate authority. Human rights lawyer Ashley Kinseth strips away the state-building rhetoric - travel permits, targeted taxes, forced labour, and confiscated land are not mistakes made by an inexperienced administration. Nor are they administrative gaps. They are central to how the AA rules. Treating them as an administrative deficit of sorts misses the point. The machinery isn't broken; it is designed to organise Rohingya expulsion. Van den Assum sees evidence of institutional progress. Kinseth sees an administrative apparatus that may satisfy elements of crimes against humanity.
At the same time, asking where the Rohingya militias obtained their weapons and how they cross a closely guarded border (albeit rhetorically) ignores credible evidence that Myanmar’s military armed, trained and housed Rohingya fighters, while certain Bangladeshi intelligence and military services facilitated their movement. State involvement is somehow turned into a story about Rohingya militia power.
Of course, van den Assum has long experience and plainly knows that these are not simply unexplained mysteries. She herself acknowledges that Rohingya factions have been used by Myanmar’s regime as a divide-and-rule tool. But by reducing state backing to a rhetorical question, it lets the real sponsors walk away. Her diplomatic caution shifts agency and blame onto the militias.
None of this excuses ARSA. Its leadership has proved to be strategically illiterate. It is an organisation implicated in killings, abductions, and other criminal activity. But ARSA is neither the autonomous liberation army depicted in its videos nor a sudden criminal development that descended upon the camps. It endures because it feeds on grievances produced by persecution and displacement. In the camps, there is genuine longing for armed liberation. In every context Rohingya find themselves in, there is a complete vacuum of political alternatives. And then there is the cynical backing of regional powers willing to use desperate people as disposable assets.
That, I fear, is the fuller story erased by the words “Happy 9th October.” The videos conceal not only the price paid by Rohingya civilians, but they also hide the forces that have shaped and repeatedly found uses for ARSA during the decade since its first attack.