Not a lot of people know who the Rohingya are. Here’s some information about them. There are about 3.5 million Rohingya in the whole world, with 1 million of them living in Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia. The Rohingya practice a Sufi- inflected version of Sunni- Islam. The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar and many of them are located in the Rakhine state. The Buddhist majority in Myanmar has major cultural and linguistic differences with the Rohingya, which caused some of them to take action. Many Buddhist nationalists terrorized the Rohingya either through rape, destruction of villages, or homicide. The Myanmar government also enacted many discriminatory policies against them, such as restricting them from an education, marriage, children, and many other privileges. The places where the Rohingya lived had widespread poverty, poor housing, lack of basic healthcare, and a high unemployment rate. The Rohingya aren’t even recognized by the government as citizens, even though the Rohingya can trace their ancestory from Myanmar centuries ago. All of these factors caused the Rohingya to leave Myanmar and seek refuge in bordering countries like Bangladesh or Thailand.

Sources:

https://www.facinghistory.org/educator-resources/current-events/responding-rohingya-crisis 

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rohingya-crisis

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/rohingya-refugee-crisis-myanmar-burma-spd/