Myanmar's Aylan Kurdi: Baby found washed ashore

A picture of a 16-month-old Rohingya baby, who washed up dead on the banks of river Naf on the Bangladesh-Mynamar border, will remind you of the haunting photo of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee lying dead on a Turkish beach.

A striking similarity between both is that they were escaping violence.

Mohammed Shohayet, a 16-month-old Rohingya refugee, and his family were crossing Naf river to make their way into Bangladesh and escape the violence in Myanmar's Rakhine state. However, during the journey their boat sank and Shohayet's mother, uncle and a three-year-old brother drowned too making his father the lone survivor.

The 16-month-old baby's body was found washed up ashore river Naf. "There is no point in me living in this world", said Shohayet's father while talking to CNN .

"In our village, helicopters fired guns at us, and the Myanmar soldiers also opened fire on us," said Alam. "We couldn't stay in our house. We fled and went into hiding in the jungle."

"My grandfather and grandmother were burnt to death," he added. "Our whole village was burnt by the military. Nothing left", he added. Thousands of Rohingya people, an ethnic minority, have fled from Myanmar to escape getting persecuted by the Myanmar military. The ethnic minority has claimed that the security forces have raped, murdered and arsoned many.

Myanmar government has refused to recognise Rohingya as one of the country's ethnic minorities and described them as Bengalis or illegal immigrants from neighbouring country- Bangladesh.

They are considered 'stateless entities' and in 2015 mass migration of thousands of Rohingya people from Myanmar started.