Dil Mohammed has lately crossed a new threshold: Recent international think‑tank briefings now echo the same details first exclusively reported here in this journal in February and March.
Inside the camps he is scaling up, staging near‑continuous rallies, opening a purpose‑built headquarters, and floating talk of a camp “election” that would formalize his role. These shifts make it worth tracking how a once‑shadowy Myanmar army informant is being remade as a central figure in refugee politics.
At a large gathering in Teknaf in the third week of June, Dil Mohammed, self-proclaimed “chief” of the Rohingya Committee for Peace and Repatriation (RCPR), addressed refugees with what first appeared to be a sermon on social order.
He banned loud wedding music, warned against online gambling, threatened action against kidnappers and drug sellers, and invoked the memory of Arakan as the true homeland. The scene felt familiar: Another camp meeting with maulvis on the platform and hundreds of refugees listening attentively. But the messaging, tightly packed into a 15-minute address, revealed something deeper.
Over roughly 200 incendiary seconds, Dil Mohammed outlawed vice and idleness, stirred loyalty with filial invocations (“Where are our parents’ graves? — Arakan”), and ended with a pointed challenge: “Will you go back or not?” In minutes, he cast himself not only as a community leader but as moral enforcer and gatekeeper of return.
This was no one-off performance.
Over the past year, security agencies have cleared the way for regular mass rallies. Meeting summaries shared with me repeat the military recruitment quota — one able‑bodied male per family — and note the announcement of meetings by camp majhis through their camp-specific WhatsApp groups.
In a startling twist unveiled at recent rallies, Dil Mohammed has begun pitching what he calls a camp-wide “election” to install a single Rohingya figurehead. Under the proposal, vetted organizers would select just 3,000-7,000 camp residents to vote on a shortlist of pre-approved names. In Teknaf he spelled out the endgame: The winner would sit above every faction and become the sole contact point for Bangladeshi officials, foreign envoys, and delegations.
In April he also inaugurated a large office in Block D, Camp 1E — a building large enough for visiting delegations, opened with quiet congratulations from DGFI and NSI officers and no mobile phones allowed. The infrastructure signals that Dil Mohammed intends to be more than a preacher; he is positioning himself as an institutional figurehead.
What makes Dil Mohammed’s authority remarkable is how recent his arrival is. Until 2024, he was still based across the border in northern Maungdaw; a year ago he slipped into Bangladesh and, with the blessing of camp‑based intelligence officers, vaulted over long‑established commanders to present himself as the Rohingya voice-in‑waiting.
He is not a community elder shaped by exile, nor a cleric with decades of moral capital; he is a latecomer whose notoriety in Rakhine — smuggling, extortion, informing for the junta — initially made many refugees distrust him. Indeed, it is precisely this reputation that intrigues refugees and the reason why they go to listen to “Dil Mohammed, Sir.”
State agencies have paved the way for his rise. Intelligence handlers shepherded his lieutenants into photo‑ops with the OIC’s special envoy and UN Secretary‑General António Guterres, burnishing a legitimacy he lacked on his own. With that scaffolding in place, he has begun to soften last year’s jihad rhetoric into the present sermon of discipline and orderly repatriation.
In Camp 12, during a Friday speech on June 20, he chided refugees who had “become too comfortable,” too invested in camp businesses and schooling (he never had any schooling himself) to consider a return. “Our homeland is yearning for us,” he said. “And yet here we are, living under tarpaulin sheets — shelters not even fit for the cattle we once raised back in Arakan.”
The shift in rhetoric is not accidental. It is image management. And it serves multiple audiences. To conservative refugees, he aligns himself with Islamic clerics. The same clerics occupy the platform in most of his events. To Bangladeshi authorities, he offers order and obedience. To wary donors and humanitarian agencies, he recasts himself as a guardian of the community. He is pitching himself as a broker: Of discipline, repatriation, and control.
Let’s be clear: Dil Mohammed’s rise is not organic, rather it’s engineered. His message dovetails neatly with the official Bangladeshi line that repatriation is “the only proper solution.” In echoing this, he buys protection and extends the state’s reach inside the camps, silencing dissent, enforcing recruitment, and reshaping/disciplining daily life.
The Teknaf sermon makes that role explicit. By promising to hand over criminals to the authorities, he offers himself as an informal police chief. By warning families not to send rations to “the killers of our brothers,” he casts economic smuggling as treason. The threat is implicit: Obey or be denounced.
But his newfound moral persona collapses under scrutiny. For years, Dil Mohammed operated as a cartel fixer, smuggling yaba tablets and gold. He has long collaborated with Myanmar’s border police and military. He was named in refugee testimony as having attempted to rape a Thet woman in the mid-2000s — a charge that never reached prosecution, likely due to protection from military patrons.
His vilification of the Arakan Army as “thieves” is not without basis — the AA has its own record of abuse against Rohingya civilians — but it is also self-serving. He positions himself as leading a righteous armed-group coalition, obscuring a messier truth: That both sides have harmed Rohingya communities, and that he himself has long been a proxy for violent state actors.
Why does this matter? Because the Teknaf address signals the consolidation of hard and soft power under the guise of moral leadership. It makes repatriation, not safety or justice, the central narrative. And it renders hesitation or critique a punishable act.
What kind of leadership is this? Not representative but proxy rule. And it is made possible by a policy environment that rewards obedience and buries accountability. The world should not be surprised if, when the next crisis erupts, it bears the fingerprints of those whose names we already know, but whose roles are still being sanitized for diplomatic consumption.
Dil Mohammed is not an outlier. He is the product of a system that has turned refugee camps into security laboratories. If donors and policymakers want to understand the stakes, they must start by acknowledging the uncomfortable actors propped up in their name.
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Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focusing on the politics of refugee management in South and Southeast Asia. He writes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter.
