AKIPRESS.COM - Myanmar’s government said it had evacuated at least 4,000 non-Muslim villagers amid ongoing clashes in northwestern Rakhine state, as thousands more Rohingya Muslims sought to flee across the border to Bangladesh on Sunday.

The death toll from the violence that erupted on Friday with coordinated attacks by Rohingya insurgents has climbed to 104, the vast majority militants, plus 12 members of security forces and several civilians, according to a Reuters tally based on official releases.

The government said it was investigating whether members of international aid groups had been involved in an alleged siege by the insurgents of a village in Rakhine.

The United Nations had pulled out non-essential staff from the area, said a spokesman, while Pope Francis expressed his solidarity with the Muslim minority in his weekly address in Rome.

Bracing for more violence, thousands of Rohingya - mostly women and children - attempted to forge the Naf river separating Myanmar and Bangladesh and the land border. Reuters reporters at the border heard gunfire from the Myanmar side, which triggered a rush of Rohingya towards the no man’s land between the countries.

“Please save us,” 61-year-old Amir Hossain told Reuters near the Bangladeshi village of Gumdhum. “We want to stay here or else we’ll get killed.”

Around 2,000 people have been able to cross into Bangladesh since Friday, according to estimates by Rohingya refugees living in the makeshift camps in Bangladesh.

The violence marks a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered in the region since last October, when a similar but much smaller Rohingya attack prompted a brutal military operation dogged by allegations of serious human rights abuses.

The treatment of approximately 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya in mainly Buddhist Myanmar has emerged as the biggest challenge for national leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi has condemned the raids in which insurgents wielding guns, sticks and homemade bombs assaulted 30 police stations and an army base.

Win Myat Aye, Myanmar’s minister for social welfare, relief and resettlement, told Reuters late on Saturday that 4,000 “ethnic villagers” who had fled their villages had been evacuated, referring to non-Muslim residents of the area.