Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), comprising the three districts of Bandarban, Rangamati and Khagrachhari, sits on a volatile fault line between South and Southeast Asia. The security calculus in Dhaka is increasingly being rewritten by events across the border.
Since late 2024, the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) has asserted control over Myanmar’s entire frontier with Bangladesh following its advances around Maungdaw in Rakhine state. The result is a combustible mix of cross-border spillover from Myanmar’s civil war, a supercharged methamphetamine corridor and a complex web of local armed groups.
From the newly emerged Kuki-Chin National Front (KNF) to longstanding factions of the United People’s Democratic Front (UPDF) and the Jana Samhati Samiti (JSS), these groups are competing for revenue through systemic extortion and “taxation.”
This spillover is not abstract. In February 2024, over 260 Myanmar border guards fled into Bangladesh amid escalating conflict, while shelling and stray rounds killed at least two people inside Bandarban. These episodes underscore how a porous, mountainous frontier can drag the CHT into crises originating next door.
Demographics and grievances
While sparsely populated by Bangladeshi standards, the CHT is socially complex. Bangladesh’s 2022 census places Bandarban’s population at roughly 481,000, with Bengalis constituting 58.9% alongside numerous indigenous communities, including the Marma, Mro, Bawm and Tripura.
Low literacy rates and rugged geography make service delivery expensive and policing difficult. In this terrain, control over key chokepoints such as mountain ridges, river crossings and major towns translates directly into the power to tax local commerce and movement.
Land remains the core political fault line. Nearly three decades after the 1997 Peace Accord promised a path to redress, the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission is paralyzed. It faces a backlog of over 22,000 unresolved applications, hobbled by leadership gaps and still-unfinalized rules of procedure.
Though factional violence between the UPDF and JSS periodically flares, the most disruptive recent development is the rise of the KNF in Bandarban.
In late 2022, authorities alleged the KNF was providing training for a new extremist network, Jama’atul Ansar Fil Hindal Sharqiya (JAFHS), triggering a series of security raids. The government banned JAFHS by mid-2023, effectively dismantling its network.
The KNF drew national attention again in April 2024 after brazenly robbing banks and looting weapons in the Ruma–Thanchi area. The ensuing crackdown led to mass arrests, with courts ordering 53 suspects detained.
The incident signaled a dangerous convergence of insurgency and criminality, where armed groups increasingly prioritize generating revenue and securing weapons over political ideology.
The conflict economy
The regional boom in synthetic drugs is supercharging insecurity. The UNODC’s 2025 assessment reported a record 236 tons of methamphetamine seized in East and Southeast Asia in 2024, a 24% increase from the previous year, with Myanmar as the epicenter of production.
This supply shock is rippling through the Naikhongchhari–Teknaf corridor. Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) now routinely seizes illegal methamphetamine tablets (known as yaba) by the hundreds of thousands and crystal meth (ice) in multi-kilogram loads.
These seizures represent lost revenue for trafficking syndicates, incentivizing them to push operations further inland along remote hill tracks. BGB has publicly alleged that the Arakan Army facilitates parts of the drug trade, reflecting the new territorial reality across the border.
Extortion has also become a systemic feature of the CHT’s economy. An August 2025 investigative report documented how armed groups stalled public works projects across Rangamati through routine threats and abductions.
One contractor was forced to pay 2.4 million taka ($20,400) to resume construction on a mosque. This practice acts as a tax that deters investment, inflates the cost of basic infrastructure and fundamentally undermines the state’s legitimacy.
Twenty-eight years on, the promises of the 1997 CHT Peace Accord – devolution of power and dispute resolution – remain unfulfilled. The institutional architecture designed to reduce conflict, including the Hill District Councils and the Land Commission, is only partially implemented.
Meanwhile, a heavy security footprint maintained under “Operation Uttoron” continues to blur civil-military lines, fueling a perception gap that any stabilization effort must address.
Treacherous trajectory
Looking ahead, several trends will signal the region’s trajectory. Observers should monitor the KNF’s operational tempo in Bandarban, watching for attacks that could signal organizational adaptation.
Another critical indicator is cross-border volatility with Myanmar, where the AA’s control increases both smuggling opportunities and the risk of escalation. Domestically, drug seizure patterns will reveal the intensity of trafficking, while increased extortion pressure on public works will show the strength of armed groups.
Finally, and most importantly, any credible reduction in the Land Commission’s 22,000-case backlog would be the clearest sign that the government is addressing the structural drivers of grievance.
A sustainable solution requires a calibrated mix of security and governance reforms. Dhaka must modernize border management with better technology and establish quiet deconfliction channels to manage incidents.
This must be paired with a concerted effort to starve the conflict economy by expanding financial intelligence operations against the networks that fund both insurgents and traffickers.
Critically, the government must make it a priority to fully implement land dispute resolution and clear the commission’s backlog, as this is the single most important step toward de-escalation.
Concurrently, security operations should be rebalanced to return routine policing to civil authorities where possible. Finally, new tools like anti-extortion task forces are needed to protect public works and weaken the economic grip of armed groups.
The security crisis in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is ultimately a problem of land, money and a neighbor at war. As Myanmar’s conflict and the regional meth trade reshape the landscape, security raids alone will not alter the calculus that makes violence and extortion profitable.
Dhaka has the levers to change this reality. It can deliver land justice, choke off illicit financing and modernize border management to prevent tactical incidents from becoming strategic crises. The window to act—before today’s volatile trends harden into tomorrow’s status quo—is narrower than it looks.
Md Obaidullah is a visiting scholar at Daffodil International University, Dhaka. He is also a graduate assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi. He has published extensively with Routledge, Springer Nature and SAGE. He can be reached at mdobaidullah.com
