Rohingya in Saudi Arabia

In 2013, under Makkah Governor Prince Khalid Al-Faisal and authorized by King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia launched the Project for Correcting the Status of the Burmese Community, a dedicated administrative effort based at the Kudai site in Makkah, bringing together the Ministry of Interior, the passport authority (Jawazat), the Ministry of Human Resources, and community leaders. Over 117 weeks, the committee biometrically registered and processed between 249,900 and 270,000 Rohingya residents. [L8,L9]

Those regularized received a special multi-year residency card known as "Majawar lil-Ibadah" (Neighboring for Worship): a status that waived standard residency fees, renewal charges, and exit/re-entry permits, and counted a regularized Rohingya worker as just one-quarter of a standard foreign worker under the Nitaqat labor-quota system, giving Saudi employers a direct incentive to hire them. [Doc]

The drive had a hard limit: eligibility was capped to those who had entered the Kingdom before 2008 and whose identity could be verified by an established community elder. Everyone who arrived after 2011, fleeing the worst of the Rakhine violence, was excluded outright. Because these later arrivals typically entered on forged South Asian passports, Saudi records still list them under those false nationalities, unable to obtain a valid Iqama, open a bank account, or work legally, and permanently exposed to arrest. [Doc]

Saudi Arabia runs no state food-ration system for Rohingya residents, and does not permit international agencies like UNHCR or the World Food Programme to distribute direct aid inside the Kingdom. [Doc] The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSrelief) focuses its Rohingya-related work almost entirely abroad, in Cox's Bazar and Rakhine State, though it periodically funds social and health programs in Makkah's Rohingya quarters. [Doc]

Day-to-day support instead runs through Islamic philanthropy: local charitable foundations (Jam'iyyat Khayriyyah) operating under Ministry of Human Resources supervision, and neighborhood religious endowments (Waqf) funded by Saudi benefactors, provide stipends, subsidized medical care, and seasonal food aid during Ramadan and Eid al-Adha. Regularized families also run informal community welfare funds (Sunduq Khayri), pooling small monthly contributions to help widows, orphans, and undocumented households facing a medical emergency or needing bail money. [Doc]

Rohingya housing in Makkah is concentrated in dense, informal hillside quarters, multi-story concrete and brick buildings added incrementally over decades without formal municipal planning, in neighborhoods like Qouz Al-Nakasah, Al-Kudwa, and Dahlat Al-Rashad. High rents push multiple nuclear families into single cramped apartments. Water supply is irregular, forcing households to buy from private tanker trucks to fill rooftop storage tanks, and inadequate sewage infrastructure sends wastewater running through narrow, unpaved, steeply graded alleys, conditions that also block emergency and ambulance access. [Doc]

These same neighborhoods are now being systematically cleared. Under the Makkah Informal Neighborhoods Redevelopment Project, run by the Al-Balad Al-Ameen development company, the government designated priority clearance zones covering more than 9.714 million square metres. Qouz Al-Nakasah, Al-Kudwa, Al-Zuhour, and Al-Sharashef, all heavily Rohingya, have been demolished in stages to make way for transport corridors, hotel towers, and pilgrimage infrastructure. [E2,E7] Saudi property owners were compensated; non-citizen Rohingya renters were not, and have been pushed outward to suburbs like Al-Kakkiah or into South Jeddah. For undocumented Rohingya, losing these neighborhoods also meant losing the social cover that had kept them out of sight of security patrols. [Doc]

Security conditions tightened sharply after the Ministry of Interior launched "Watan Bila Mukhalif" (Nation Without Offenders) in March 2017, deploying joint security forces for neighborhood raids, street checkpoints, and workplace inspections across Makkah and Jeddah. [Doc] Undocumented Rohingya caught in these sweeps are routinely transferred to the Shumaisi Detention Center, a complex spanning over 2.5 million square metres on the Jeddah-Makkah highway with an official capacity of 32,000. Detainees are held in large communal rooms of 64 to 72 people, sleeping on metal bunks with little sunlight or outdoor access. Because Myanmar will not safely accept them back, hundreds of Rohingya have been held at Shumaisi indefinitely, in some cases for one to over six years. [L2,L4,L7]

Prolonged detention has repeatedly pushed detainees to protest. Major hunger strikes in late 2018, January 2019, and April 2019 each involved 300 to 650 Rohingya refusing food; smuggled footage showed men pleading for release. Saudi authorities responded by confiscating smuggled phones and placing strike leaders in solitary confinement. [L6] Periodic forced deportations to Bangladesh have followed, deportees are treated as Bangladeshi nationals because of the forged passports they entered on, flown out in handcuffs from Jeddah's Hajj Terminal, and arrested on arrival in Dhaka under passport-fraud law. Before removal, Saudi authorities log each deportee's retinal scans and fingerprints, permanently barring their return to the Kingdom. [Doc]

Daily life in Saudi Arabia runs through digital identity infrastructure that undocumented Rohingya simply cannot access. Highway checkpoints operated by Public Security forces require a valid Iqama or verification through the Ministry of Interior's Absher and Muqeem portals; Rohingya holding "Majawar lil-Ibadah" cards travel freely, while undocumented residents stay confined to their home districts in Makkah and Jeddah, since any inter-city travel risks checkpoint identification and arrest. [Doc]

Banking works the same way: Saudi Central Bank rules require a verified Absher digital identity to open or operate an account, so regularized Rohingya use formal banking and the Wage Protection System, while undocumented Rohingya operate entirely in cash, saving in cash or gold and relying on informal Hawala brokers, or paying a commission to a regularized community member to wire money to relatives in Bangladesh or Myanmar. Mobile access follows the same divide: activating a SIM card requires biometric verification under Communications, Space and Technology Commission rules, so undocumented Rohingya buy secondary-market SIMs registered to other foreign workers at inflated cost. Encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Telegram have become essential community infrastructure, used to run real-time alert networks warning of police checks, demolition crews, or labor inspections. [Doc]

Economic standing within the community tracks almost exactly with era of arrival and legal status. Families established before the 1980s often run workshops, hold retail or auto-repair businesses through a Saudi sponsor, and pass down multi-generational savings and property leases. The 1990s-to-2007 cohort, regularized and counted under the Nitaqat quarter-worker quota, works as skilled tailors, mechanics, drivers, and construction supervisors, earning moderate but Saudization-vulnerable wages. Post-2011 undocumented arrivals sit at the bottom: manual day labor, street vending, portering for pilgrims around the Grand Mosque, and waste collection, paid sub-minimum cash wages with constant arrest risk. [Doc]

Because Saudi law bars non-citizens from owning a commercial enterprise outright, Rohingya entrepreneurs rely on Tasattur, a commercial-cover arrangement where a Saudi citizen registers the business, lease, and bank account in their own name for a fee, leaving the actual Rohingya operator legally unprotected and exposed to a sponsor unilaterally seizing the business or raising fees. Saudization policy has further squeezed the community out of retail sectors like mobile phones, auto parts, and garment sales, pushing many back into lower-paid informal work. [Doc]

At their peak, more than 121 charity-run Burmese Community Schools taught basic literacy and Islamic studies across Makkah's informal quarters. After the 2013 regularization drive, the Ministry of Education absorbed most of this system: official figures put 54,000 to 62,650 regularized Rohingya students in Saudi public schools, with 1,307 university scholarships awarded to top graduates at institutions like Umm Al-Qura University and King Abdulaziz University. Undocumented children remain barred from public schools entirely, since enrollment requires a national civil ID number, and depend instead on informal, unaccredited mosque-based learning circles (Kuttabs), or receive no schooling at all. [Doc]

Healthcare follows the identical split. Regularized "Majawar lil-Ibadah" holders get full access to public hospitals and clinics, Makkah Governorate reports over 781 million Saudi Riyals spent on their care. Undocumented Rohingya are excluded from public hospitals outright, and seeking non-emergency treatment risks staff reporting them to security. They rely instead on private neighborhood clinics, charity medical drives, or over-the-counter self-medication. [Doc]

Saudi state media and officials frame the Kingdom's history with the Rohingya as pan-Islamic solidarity: sanctuary offered decades before international agencies engaged with the crisis, and the 2013 regularization drive as an unprecedented model that gave 250,000-plus stateless people free residency, jobs, education, and healthcare without confining them to aid-dependent camps. Enforcement, demolitions, and crackdowns are presented as legitimate responses to undocumented migration and urban decay, not as anti-refugee policy, framed under the modernization goals of Vision 2030. [L8,L9,E4,E6]

International rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Fortify Rights, acknowledge that history but focus squarely on the present: indefinite detention of hundreds of post-2011 Rohingya at Shumaisi without charge, trial, or legal counsel, and forced deportations to Bangladesh, where deportees face arrest for passport fraud, which they argue breaches the customary international-law principle against refoulement. Rights groups also point to what they call a "biometric passport trap": the state's own records list stateless Rohingya as South Asian nationals based on forged documents, erasing their actual identity and blocking any path to protection. [L1,L2,L3,L4]

Within the community itself, the picture is mixed. Older, regularized Rohingya describe genuine gratitude toward the Saudi monarchy, contrasting economic inclusion and religious access in Makkah with what they fled in Myanmar. But the same families describe real anguish: parents with valid Iqamas whose own children or relatives, arriving after 2011, live in constant fear of arrest, and the demolition of neighborhoods like Qouz Al-Nakasah eroding the community's economic base and leaving many feeling permanently temporary despite generations in the Kingdom. [Doc]