The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognize his friends by the colours of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. By the time the soldiers stopped shooting at the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, only Kadir and two teammates were still alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends lying among the bodies in two graves.

They are among more than five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 ‘terrorists’ in the village of Inn Din. The AP’s findings, however, suggest not only the military’s slaughter of civilians but the presence of many more graves with many more people.

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. The UN special envoy on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said Thursday that the military’s operations against the Rohingya bear ‘the hallmarks of a genocide.’