“The fact is that Myanmar’s Muslims should not be forgotten because their problem is still unresolved,” Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said in a meeting with a number of officials of the Iranian Red Crescent Society in the central city of Qom on Sunday.

The Rohingya Muslims are facing life-threatening problems inside Myanmar and have been seeking refuge outside of the country, he noted.

“…We, as Muslims, should join hands (to save the Rohingya) since they are our religious brothers and we have a responsibility (to help them),” the cleric went on to say.

The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have long faced severe discrimination and have been the targets of intensified violence since 2012.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees have fled recent violence in Myanmar since August this year when the military started a crackdown on the Muslim minority.

The UN top human rights official has accused Myanmar of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against Rohingya Muslims.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said in September the military’s “brutal” security campaign was in clear violation of international law, and cited what he called refugees’ consistent accounts of widespread extrajudicial killings, rape and other atrocities.

Speaking to reporters in Tehran on Saturday before his departure for the Kazakh capital of Astana, Rouhani said on the sidelines of the First OIC Summit on Science and Technology, the heads of state will examine conditions of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

“Today, a major human tragedy and ethnic and ideological cleansing is taking place in Myanmar and hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been displaced in this region,” he said, adding that the Muslim world cannot remain silent on the measures taken by the Myanmar government.

He further emphasized that international organizations should impose pressure on the Myanmar government and army to prevent the oppression of the Rohingya Muslims.

Heading a high-ranking delegation, President Rouhani left Tehran for Astana to take part in the First OIC Summit on Science and Technology due to open in the Kazakh capital on Sunday.

Rouhani is slated to deliver a speech at the OIC summit and meet with some heads of state of the Muslim countries during his two-day visit to Kazakhstan.

The Rohingya have long faced severe discrimination and were the targets of violence in 2012 that killed hundreds and drove about 140,000 people from their homes to camps for the internally displaced.

Over the past days, intensifying clashes between security forces and insurgents in western Myanmar have sent about 270,000 terrified civilians scrambling toward the Bangladesh border in a desperate search for refuge.

A United Nations report in February said the military crackdown on the Rohingya had led to gang rape, the killing of hundreds of civilians and the forced displacement of people.