Turkish field hospital reopens at Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh

Bangladesh on Saturday reopened a Turkish field hospital at the Rohingya refugee camp which was damaged by a fire last year.

The hospital daily performs 20 operations and examines 2,000 people, Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu said during his speech at the opening ceremony in Bangladesh's southeastern city of Cox's Bazar.

After being destroyed in the fire, the hospital was reconstructed by the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) upon the instruction of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Noting that Turkey took "immediate" action to heal the wounds of the fire, Soylu said: "We couldn't leave these sad, oppressed people alone as well as Bangladesh, which is home to these people."

He added that 700,000 treatments have been carried out in the hospital so far.


The Turkish interior minister is also set to meet with his Bangladeshi counterpart Asaduzzaman Khan later in the day.

Bangladesh is home to more than 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, most of whom fled a brutal military crackdown in their home country of Myanmar in August 2017.

Since Aug. 25, 2017, nearly 24,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed while more than 34,000 were thrown into fires, over 114,000 beaten, and as many as 18,000 Rohingya women and girls raped, according to a report by the Ontario International Development Agency.