There's no warning for what is about to come. The main road from Cox's Bazar towards the Bangladesh-Myanmar border is the usual chaotic sub-continental ride.

The road slows as the traffic increases. But it is not cars or trucks. It is people. Thousands and thousands of them. We have driven straight into the overspill of the Kutupalong refugee camp.

This mass of humanity is some of the quarter of a million Rohingya that have fled Myanmar since the end of August.

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Image: People are having to wade through thick mud

In the hours I spend here talking to refugees about their escape across the border, I can see the number has swelled significantly. They arrive on trucks, on the backs of Jeeps, in tractors and on foot.


Entire families - some very old, others just babies. There are men in baskets who have been carried because they are too old, sick or infirm.

Crude, makeshift shelters spring up all around us. Scraps of tarpaulin tied to bamboo poles. Inside, families.

Sometimes, there are two or three generations sitting in silence. They are all wearing the same hollow expressions of exhaustion, with blank stares from eyes that have witnessed great horror.

Image: A massive refugee camp has been set up that is getting larger

There are too many hungry mouths to feed. Passing trucks throw out handfuls of puffed rice and grain prompting a desperate scramble of bony hands clutching at the aid. They do not know where their next meal is coming from.

We are a few miles from the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, just south east of Cox's Bazar.

This a grim, temporary settlement for the people that nobody wants.

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The ground is still sodden from the monsoon rain and is turning into a swamp stirred by the endless march of tired, broken feet.

Here, I meet Toyaba Khanun Noorattan. She is four months pregnant with her first child.

Toyaba tells me she trekked for 12 days over hills and through jungles to get here. She fled her village in Myanmar as it was being torched by soldiers.

Image: People scramble for little food having walked miles

Her brother was shot in the face and killed as he tried to protect the family. They left his body behind.

Toyaba is now separated from her husband. She has no idea where he is.

There are 12 other women in the hut with her. All are expectant mothers. Some are due to have their babies any day now. Each one has an equally harrowing account.

The UN says more than a quarter of a million Rohingya have fled Myanmar in the last two weeks alone escaping a brutal army crackdown.

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Monir Alam is one of them. The 16-year-old shows me his wounds. Three injuries to his legs. He was shot as he fled his village with his family. His wounds were probably caused by shotgun pellets or ball bearings.

They were serious enough for him to have to be carried across the border by his brother and father.

Bangladesh is a desperately poor country and it cannot cope with this exodus. But there is no end in sight.

I am told thousands more are waiting to make their way across the border. All swapping one misery for another.

Image: The number pouring over the Bangladesh-Myanmar border continues to increase

There is no way for me to independently verify the accounts that have been shared with me. But these stories could be told over and over again by anyone of the thousands of Rohingya in this camp and others.

I am absolutely certain of one thing: these people are fleeing from something.

Toyaba tells me wants to return home to Myanmar when the fighting is over. But for the world's most persecuted people that will not happen anytime soon.

Probably never.