‘As the night descended, they came and killed’: Sudan’s other war

Borota Refugee Camp, Chad – The late afternoon sun blazed as a boy barely three years old picked up a shell casing from the dusty ground. In his tiny hands, the shiny remnants of war looked like the heaviest toy.

Nearby, a group of women emerged from their makeshift shelters made of colorful garments tied to wooden sticks. A song blared in the distance – its lively beat at odds with the harrowing tales of murder, escape and agony whispered through this corner of eastern Chad.

“When night fell, they came and killed,” said Zara Khan Umar, a refugee from Sudan’s bordering Darfur region who is now sheltering in an informal settlement in Borota. “Any men they meet on the way, they kill.”

The 40-year-old is one of more than 90,000 people who have crossed the border in recent weeks to escape the fighting that has gripped Sudan. In mid-April, a rivalry erupted between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, at war. While the Sudanese capital of Khartoum has been the main battleground so far, fighting has also spread to cities in the conflict-ravaged region of Darfur.

There, the resurgence of violence quickly took on an intercommunal dimension, with armed Arab men taking on fighters from the Masalit ethnic group in clashes that witnesses and survivors described as vicious.