Two boats carrying some 530 Rohingya asylum seekers left Myanmar’s Rakhine state on June 29 and have not been heard from since. The equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people has disappeared.

It is very likely that both capsized. The monsoon has begun, the sea is rough and the boats, usually old fishing trawlers converted to transport as many people as possible, are barely seaworthy and have unreliable engines.

It is also very likely that there will be few or no survivors. It is possible that half of them were women and children.

But we will never know for sure.

Rakhine has been in a state of war for many years, with the insurgent Arakan Army driving the Myanmar army out of most of it and besieging its last stronghold in the state capital, Sittwe, which is now only accessible by air and sea. Almost all telecommunications have been cut off.

Chris Lewa, who runs the Arakan Project which campaigns to improve the situation for the Rohingya, has been trying to piece together what may have happened to the two ships.

This is extremely challenging. He no longer has any contacts he can contact in Sittwe or in Sin Tet Maw, the village controlled by the Arakan Army from which the ships departed.

But through a series of other contacts, combined with other bits of information, he is confident that both ships left on June 29, one in the morning and the other later that day.

She says they would have headed to Myanmar’s southern coast, where they would unload their human cargo onto smaller boats to return them to the mainland.

From there they would be transported by road, through transit camps in the forest, through Thailand to the Malaysian border.

Normally their families would expect to hear from them within a week or 10 days. Almost three weeks later, they haven’t heard anything.

Bangladesh authorities have recovered the body of a woman, washed away by the sea. Fishermen working in the sea between the Irrawaddy Delta and the coast of Mon State found several more bodies nine days later.

Chris Lewa believes all of this suggests that the ships capsized, one several hours after setting sail from Sin Tet Maw and the other after several days of sailing southeast.

There are more than a million Rohingya living in overcrowded camps in southern Bangladesh, where aid is running out, there are almost no jobs and organized crime gangs operate freely. They are not allowed to go out.