Over months, dozens of Muslims and Buddhists suspected of being informants for Myanmar's military had their throats slit or were hacked to death.

Authorities in strife-torn Rakhine state had no warning that the world's newest Islamic insurgency was about to make its biggest strike.

In the early hours of August 25, hundreds of fighters from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) simultaneously stormed 30 police posts and an army base in the townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Ratheddaung.

Equipped with hand-held explosive devices, machetes and a few small arms, they killed 10 police officers, a soldier and an immigration official.

According to Myanmar's government, its security forces eventually got the upper hand in fierce battles, killing 77 insurgents and capturing one.

The military's response to the attacks was brutal. Under the guise of "cleansing operations", soldiers have torched more than 1000 Rohingya villages, shot people as they tried to flee, raped women and slaughtered children in what the United Nations says amounts to "textbook ethnic cleansing".

Images of more than 410,000 distressed Rohingya fleeing to squalid camps across the border in Bangladesh have shocked the world.

The influx created the worst humanitarian crisis in Asia in decades.

While international outrage over the crisis has been levelled at Myanmar's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her country's military, ARSA turned to social media like Twitter to portray itself as a moderate group fighting for the rights of Rakhine's 1.1 million persecuted Rohingya, claiming it should not be branded a terrorist organisation.

"This land is called Arakan and belongs to Rohingya," ARSA's Pakistan-born commander Ataullah Jununi said in a video, using an alternative name for Rakhine.

But analysts say it is inconceivable that ARSA's leaders did not anticipate the military's retaliation with a scorched-earth campaign targeting Rohingya, given its violent response to previous low-level attacks in Rakhine.

Bertil Lintner, a veteran analyst on Myanmar affairs, says that if ARSA's goal was to protect the Rohingya, as the group claims, the attacks backfired horribly.

"But the militants must have calculated the wider benefits that could be derived from the blowback," Lintner wrote in the Asia Times.

"The international publicity surrounding the Rohingya's plight has been unprecedented, promising new and potentially lucrative support from the Arab and Muslim worlds and more angry young men to recruit," he said.

"But the victims of this cynical game are the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya and others who have been forced from their homes and now languish in squalid camps in Bangladesh or the inhospitable no man's land along the two countries' increasingly hellish border."

Analysts believe ARSA, originally known as Harakah al-Yaqin or "the faith movement", was established after deadly riots between Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine in 2012, which killed about 200 people, almost all of them Muslims.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) warned last December that ARSA is overseen by a committee of Rohingya emigres based in Saudi Arabia and has links to international jihadist organisations, although it has not attacked civilians or religious targets.

One extremist who has appeared in videos calling for jihad in Myanmar is Karachi-based Rohingya Abdul Qadoos Burmi, who has links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, or the Army of the Righteous, one of South Asia's largest terrorist organisations.

The ICG warned that while the Rohingya have never been a radicalised population, the Myanmar government's heavy-handed military response in Rakhine "increases the risk of spiralling violence".

Myanmar's military has been fighting ethnic armies in mostly border areas for decades, but the ARSA represents a new type of insurgency.

The group's fighters mingle with villagers and wear civilian clothes. Many of its estimated 500 fighters are conscripted villagers.

"ARSA itself may have been able to recruit angry and desperate young men among the Rohingya in Rakhine state and refugee camps in Bangladesh but, according to security analysts, there are 150-odd foreigners among them," Lintner said.

Lintner quotes security analysts saying fighters come from countries including Pakistan, Malaysia and southern Thailand and training camps have been run by veterans of the Afghan wars.

South-east Asian countries fear the crisis will open a breeding ground for the recruitment of Islamist extremists and that terror groups like Islamic State will seek to take advantage of it.

"Should this happen, Malaysia and neighbouring countries will bear the brunt of serious instability to the region," said Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman.