A Kutupalong camp fire broke out on Friday at the sprawling refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, southeastern Bangladesh, the world’s largest displacement centre, housing over one million Rohingya who have fled persecution in neighbouring Myanmar. The full extent of damage, including the number of shelters destroyed and any casualties, was not immediately available at the time of publication.
The Kutupalong complex sits across 13 square kilometres of Cox’s Bazar district and encompasses more than 30 individual camps, packed at densities of up to 53,000 people per square kilometre. The shelters are overwhelmingly constructed from bamboo and tarpaulin. materials that were designed to last months at the time of the 2017 influx but which hundreds of thousands of refugees have been forced to inhabit for nearly a decade. They ignite rapidly and burn faster than emergency responders can typically contain without immediate access to sufficient water and navigable camp roads.
Kutupalong Camp: A Camp With A Grim Record Of Fire
Friday’s blaze is the latest in a long, recurring cycle. Between January 2021 and December 2022 alone, more than 222 fire incidents were recorded across the Kutupalong camps, including at least 60 confirmed arsons. The most catastrophic single incident was in March 2021, when a fire that began in the Balukhali section of the complex killed at least 15 people, injured more than 560, left around 400 missing, and displaced approximately 50,000 people within a single afternoon. A further major fire in March 2023 destroyed 2,000 shelters and left 12,000 people homeless. In January 2026, a pre-dawn blaze in Camp 16 destroyed more than 335 homes and affected over 2,000 people, drawing renewed calls from agencies including the International Organization for Migration and the Norwegian Refugee Council for safer shelter construction and emergency funding.
Humanitarian agencies have repeatedly identified the same structural conditions driving the risk: severe overcrowding, flammable shelter materials, inadequate access roads that delay fire brigades, scarcity of on-site water points, and chronically underfunded responses. In 2025, just 50.1 per cent of required funding for the Rohingya refugee response was delivered, with shelter projects receiving only 19.6 per cent of their assessed need.
No Path Home
The over one million Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar. The majority of whom arrived after August 2017, following a military campaign in Myanmar’s Rakhine State that drew international accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, have no viable route to repatriation. Conditions inside Myanmar have worsened significantly since the military coup of February 2021 and the subsequent intensification of conflict between the junta and armed resistance groups across Rakhine and other states. Each fire that sweeps through Kutupalong strips families of their documents, belongings, and whatever fragile stability camp life permits, returning them to square one in a situation that already offers no clear ending.
Published in SouthAsianDesk, June 13, 2026
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