These prisoners of war were mostly transferred to prisoner-of-war camps in Myanmar, which was under British colonial rule at the time.

The cemetery in Meiktila where the soldiers were buried soon fell into disrepair, though in 2012 the Turkish government paid for it to be restored in order to serve as a memorial (after Turkish-Myanmar relations began to improve under the presidency of Thein Sein.

In 2013, Islamophobic rumors spread in the Mandalay region that after the cemetery was restored, a mosque would constructed nearby, which were denied by a local Muslim community leader.

[4] According to Frontier Myanmar journalist James T. Davies, ... the rumours about the cemetery [in Meiktila] were due to a misunderstanding.

This had exacerbated tension in the town between Buddhists and Muslims, which was already strained by the violence in Rakhine State.