Rape is being used as a weapon of war in the Rohingya crisis, with no woman safe from the risk of sexual attack as Myanmar's Muslim minority is driven out of its homeland, according to experts in the field and those caught up in the crisis. Doctors treating some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in recent weeks have seen dozens of women with injuries consistent with violent sexual attacks, according to U.N. clinicians.

Rohingya Muslim refugees are evacuated in a truck to a refugee camps after crossing the Naf River, in Teknaf, Bangladesh's Ukhia district. File pic/AFP

And women interviewed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation tell of violent rape by Myanmar security forces as they flee their homes, part of a mass Rohingya exodus. "The Burmese (Myanmar) military has clearly used rape as one of a range of horrific methods of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya," said Skye Wheeler, a sexual violence expert with Human Rights Watch who has assessed the fast-filling camps.

"Rape and other forms of sexual violence has been widespread and systematic as well as brutal, humiliating and traumatic," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Myanmar dismisses all such accusations of ethnic cleansing, saying it has to tackle insurgents, whom it accuses of starting fires and attacking civilians, as well as the security forces.

Yet villagers fleeing the violence say rape is a routine weapon in the military's armoury, with the United Nations now deliberating whether the violence amounts to genocide.