SUMMARY

The Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) was founded in 1982. Fighting against Burma’s (now known as Myanmar) military government, it aimed to bringing autonomy and citizenship rights to the long-disadvantaged Muslim Rohingya people of Arakan (now Rakhine) state. The RSO developed as a more radical and strictly religious faction of the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF), established in 1974. A more moderate RSO splinter group, the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF), was formed in 1986 under the leadership of Nurul Islam. In 1998, the RSO and the ARIF merged together to form the Arakan Rohingya National Orgnization (ARNO). Throughout its history, the RSO has been led by the Arakan medical doctor, Muhammad Yunus.

The RSO has its roots in the pan-Islamist movement which swept the world in the 1970s. Taking a more conservative, religious approach to earlier Rohingya groups such as the RPF, the RSO found support from other similarly minded groups abroad, including the Hizb-I Islami-yi Afghanistan, the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) in India (Kashmir) and the Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (ABIM). The organisation cooperated with Bangladesh-based groups, including the Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). Reports that RSO members attempted to build links with al-Qaida and received training in Libya and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, however, remain disputed.

Operating from camps across the border in Cox’s Bazar district, Bangladesh, the RSO launched a series of small-scale cross-border attacks throughout the 1990s. However, by the early 2000s the RSO had lost much of its operational capacity. While its parent group, the ARNO remains politically active, most analysts now believe the RSO itself is essentially defunct. Attacks against police in northern Rakhine state in October 2016 were initially believed to have been by the RSO, but appear to have been committed by the more recently formed Harakah al-Yaqin (HaY).