As bullets and rocket propelled grenades ripped through a muggy early afternoon, Molovi Mubarak caught a glimpse of the attackers before he fled: a mixture of uniformed soldiers and vigilantes in civilian clothes armed with sticks and knives.

But amid the chaos, one face in particular stood out: the local chairman, or mayor, who had promised the ethnic Rohingya villagers of Tum Bazar safety just the previous day.

He was carrying a machete.

"They had attacked Sangana, another village three kilometres away, the day before. We watched them drop bombs on it from helicopters," a dazed Mr Mubarak, 33, said in an interview with the Telegraph beneath the tarpaulin stretched between two trees that now houses his family.

Molovi Mubarak fled the village of Tum Bazar on August 26 credit: Roland Oliphant

"So we were afraid, but the military and the chairman told us we shouldn't run away from areas where the terrorists were. That we would be safe if we stayed at home," he said. "I suppose it was a trap."

It was August 26; the second day of what Aung San Suu Kyi’s government says is a counter-terrorist operation against an armed insurgent group that has claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks on border guard posts in the country’s Rakhine state.

Every day since then, thousands of people have crossed the border into neighbouring Bangladesh in what human rights groups describe as a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide - claims Burma, also known as Myanmar, denies.

In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, tens of thousands of refugees flee over the border from Burma credit: Kathleen Prior

With access to the region restricted by the Burmese military, neither account is easy to verify.

But multiple eyewitness accounts suggest that local government officials, often leading civilian vigilante groups, are cooperating with the military to perpetrate house burnings and massacres of ethnic Rohingya civilians across the state.

In all, survivors of attacks on six separate villages described seeing local government officials taking part in bloody attacks that have swept the region over the past two weeks.

A house burns in Gawdu Tharya village near Maungdaw in Burma's Rakhine state earlier this week credit: AFP

The accounts all claim that soldiers were accompanied by men in civilian clothes and armed with sticks, knives and machetes, whom the Rohingya refugees identified as members of the Rakhine community, the majority ethnic group in Rakhine state. There are long running tensions between the two communities.

The alleged involvement of officials includes helping the military to identify houses belonging to Rohingya civilians in mixed villages; actively directing and taking part in killing; and promising sanctuary apparently as part of a deliberate deception.

A Rohingya girl holds an umbrella over her little sister as they make their way across Burma's border to enter Bangladesh credit: MONIRUL ALAM/EPA

Nurul Amin, 33, said such a promise persuaded him to take refuge in the settlement of Tula Toli, a mixed Rakhine and Rohingya village, after witnessing vigilantes and soldiers massacre his wife, their three children, and his mother and mother-in-law in the neighbouring village of Garatabil on August 28.

“The soldiers shot people down with buckshot, and those who couldn’t get away were finished off with knives,” he said. “I watched it from behind a tree, but there was nothing I could do. I saw little children. They threw the children into the burning houses.

“I didn’t try to go to Bangladesh then, because there was nowhere to run to. And in Tula Toli the village chairman said ‘stay here, I am here and I promise you will be safe’,” he said.

Nurul Amin lost six members of his family including his wife and their three children in an attack on Garatabil on August 28 credit: Roland Oliphant

Mr Amin said he did not know whether the chairman, an ethnic Rakhine, had prior knowledge of a similar attack that hit that village two days later.

But Mohammed Islam, a native of Tula Toli who said he had received the same assurances of safety, said there was no question of the official’s involvement: “When I next saw him he was wearing the uniform of the military. He entered the village with them.”

Mohammed's village, Tula Toli, endured a prolonged and brutal attack credit: Kathleen Prior

Rashid Ahmed, 50, said he had received no assurances or warning before helicopters began an attack on the village of Kowsinbong in the early hours of August 29.

But like witnesses from other areas, he was adamant that he saw the chairman of the six-village district enter the village alongside soldiers and civilian vigilantes shortly afterwards.

“He was carrying a gun, a long one like soldiers carry, and poured petrol on the homes that were set on fire,” he said. “Of the vigilantes I knew a few of the faces, but not names. They were not close neighbours.”

In Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, tens of thousands of refugees flee over the border from Burma credit: Kathleen Prior

Dil Ara, a 35-year-old woman from the same village, claimed she also saw the chairman armed and alongside the militias. She claimed he was helping the military identify Rohingya-owned houses.

The Telegraph was unable to independently verify these accounts.

However, human rights groups said the reports match a pattern of violence used by the Burmese military in the region in the past.

Rohingya refugees walk in the rain as they reach the Bangladesh border at Teknaf credit: ABIR ABDULLAH/EPA

Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch Asia division, said: “What we fear is there is coordination going on between Burmese army and police with local officials and mobs of extremist ethnic Rakhine, and the result is to chase out the Rohingya and then loot and torch their villages. This is precisely what we observed in October 2012."

Aung San Suu Kyi’s government has described reports of massacres as “fake news” and “misinformation”.

It has blamed village burnings on the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the armed group that claimed responsibility for a number of deadly attacks on border posts in October 2016 and August this year.

Protesters hold Aung San Suu Kyi signs during a rally against the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Medan, Indonesia credit: Binsar Bakkara/AP

Arakan is the Rohingya name for Rakhine state. Founded by Rohingya emigres in Saudi Arabia and originally known as Harakah Al Yaqeen, or Faith Movement, the group describes itself as a resistance movement “fighting for liberation of persecuted Rohingya".

But little else is known about the group, and accounts of its effectiveness and reach are disputed.

The International Crisis Group said in a report following its first attacks last year that the emergence of the apparently well-organised and well-funded group could be a “game-changer” for Burmese government efforts to resolve on going tensions in Rakhine state.

Rohingya refugees walk through water after crossing the Burmese border with Bangladesh by boat in Teknaf credit: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters

However, others have described the group as small, poorly equipped, and barely recognisable as a military force.

AS Anwar, a Malaysia-based Rohingya journalist following the conflict, estimates their strength at no more than 1000 people. “Although it calls itself an army, four fifths of their members are armed with swords, knives and sticks and wear sarongs and slippers,” he said.

Two weeks into this conflict, the only thing that is clear is the biblical scale of the exodus and accompanying human misery that it has produced.

Hitiza, 20, spent 11 days trekking to reach the Bangladesh border, her daughter Ayesha was born on Tuesday before they made it to the frontier credit: Roland Oliphant

They come every day in their thousands, men, women, children, and newborn infants crammed into boats creeping up the bay of Bengal and wading up to their necks through the mud of rivers and paddy fields.

On Saturday the United Nations estimated nearly 300,000 Rohingya Muslims had fled Buddhist-majority Burma in the past two weeks.

But, cautioned Vivian Tan of the UNHCR, which works in two long established “official” camps here, those figures are no more than a “best guess".

Osman, who fled with his family and arrived in Cox's Bazar on September 7, take shelter under a tarpaulin in the new informal settlement of Bhalukhali credit: Kathleen Prior

“We are straining at the seams. Four days ago we thought the camps were at saturation point. Yesterday it was obvious that they had crammed even more people in. I have no idea how,” she said.

Most head for two long-standing and now overflowing refugee camps established following a previous exodus of Rohingya during violence three decades ago. But those camps are over flowing, and thousands have now built their own make-shift camps have sprung up in the woods and fields alongside.

The UNHCR, which helps run the two “official” camps, has no mandate to operate outside the by-now-imaginary boundary separating them from the sprawling tarpaulin and bamboo shanty towns that new arrivals have thrown up on every available patch of woodland and hillside.

The UN estimated nearly 300,000 Rohingya Muslims had fled Buddhist-majority Burma in the past two weeks credit: Kathleen Prior

Within the camps, it is subsidising volunteer kitchens and racing to upgrade fresh water supplies and dangerously overburdened sewage facilities.

Everyone fears an epidemic brought on by inadequate sanitation.

Aid officials speaking on condition of anonymity said a more coordinated response would probably depend on a formal request for assistance from the Bangladeshi government and international diplomatic agreement at the United Nations.

Zaina Begum, 40, has left Yamoung in Kyaukpadaung while her husband is being detained in Bothidaung prison credit: Kathleen Prior

In the meantime, much of the frontline relief is led by local volunteers.

“We have fed 4,000 people in four days,” said Ahmed Chowdhury, a businessman from Cox’s Bazar who organised two dozen friends and business acquaintances to hand out baby clothes and food to the exhausted families emerging from the paddy fields on the border near Teknaf.

“We’re just local people contributing. We don’t have anything to do with the government or the aid agencies,” he said as a column of over a thousand trudged past.

“We just had to do something. What is happening here is unbelievable. It leaves me speechless.”

Additional reporting by Kathleen Prior