For two days and one night the teenager drifted in the open sea, holding on to a piece of wood. He had been on a boat that was supposed to take him to a better life. But it capsized in the middle of the Andaman Sea last week.
Imran, 17, a refugee who uses only one name, is one of nine survivors who were rescued by a ship sailing under the Bangladeshi flag that encountered them at sea. The United Nations announced the rescue on Wednesday, saying it feared the rest of the roughly 250 people who had been on board could be dead.
The vessel that capsized, an overcrowded fishing trawler, left Teknaf in southern Bangladesh in early April and was bound for Malaysia, according to the United Nations. It sank after a couple of days at sea. The passengers were a mix of Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingya refugees, some of them children.
More than one million Rohingya, members of a Muslim minority from Myanmar, have been living in precarious refugee camps in Bangladesh since 2017, after being persecuted in their homeland and driven away from it.
“The trawler was so packed with people, we could only sleep while sitting,” Mr. Imran said in a telephone interview from the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Every couple of hours, the boatmen forced another group of passengers into the suffocating fish hold where Imran had been placed. People regularly fainted, he said.
The young man was hoping to escape the dire living conditions in the refugee camps where, like so many others, he grew up with barely any education, no right to formal work and not enough aid to survive.
For now, he is back in a camp, and the hardship there pales in comparison with his time on the boat. “Allah has saved me,” he said. “I never want to take a boat again.” He is recovering from a sunburn and has lost weight, after surviving on biscuits during his journey.
“No one should have to choose between remaining in situations of profound hardship or embarking on a journey that may cost them their lives,” said Mohammedali Abunajela, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency.
Earlier this month, food aid in the refugee camps was reduced to as little as the equivalent of $7 a month per person, after cuts to aid budgets in the United States and elsewhere. Even the most vulnerable families only receive about $12 a month per member.
For years, Rohingya have risked dangerous boat journeys in search for safety and a better life in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia or Thailand. The trips are often deadly. Last year, more than 6,500 embarked on boat journeys, according to the United Nations. About 890 did not make it to the shore alive.
“With the situation in the camps getting worse, we will see more of these tragedies in the future,” said Chris Lewa, founder of the Arakan Project, a nonprofit based in Thailand that has been tracking Rohingya boat journeys for 20 years.
Refugees, Ms. Lewa said, appeared increasingly not to board boats of their own accord; passengers were instead kidnapped by traffickers who would try to extort a ransom from their families. Mr. Imran said that he was told by the people who had organized the boat he boarded that he could pay them off after reaching Malaysia and finding a job there.
As the boat started tumbling, Mr. Imran said, some people onboard started panicking, while others began praying.
Malaysia’s coast guard said on Thursday that the boat capsized in the Andaman Sea and was not within Malaysian waters and that it did not fall under its jurisdiction and operational responsibility.
Adm. Mohd. Rosli Abdullah, the director general of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, said the agency was closely monitoring waters north of the island of Langkawi for any signs of drifting victims and debris.
“If there are reports of drifting victims or bodies entering Malaysian waters, the agency will immediately deploy assets to carry out search and rescue operations in the identified areas,” he said in a statement.
Ms. Lewa said: “It is worrying that it seems no rescue operation was launched by any state in the region. Now it is too late.”
A rescue mission might have saved people like Mohammad Ullah.
A football coach for children in his camp, Mr. Mohammad Ullah, 28, regularly warned others to not get onto boats organized by traffickers who promised them a better life elsewhere, his brother Mohammad Anis said. But in early April he boarded one himself — the one Imran was on — asking his Facebook friends to keep him in their prayers.
His family said they believed he had been trying to ward off a criminal group in the refugee camps. But now he remains missing at sea.
“It feels like the world broke — he was my only brother,” Mr. Mohammad Anis said.
Zunaira Saieed contributed reporting from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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