Sudanese seek underground refuge in besieged Darfur as civil war drags on

Sudanese paramilitary shelling of El-Obeid on Friday killed six persons, including a child, a doctor said, just weeks after the Army broke a prolonged siege of the key southern city.

Beneath the broken earth of the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher in the western region of Darfur, Nafisa Malik clutches her five children close.

As shells rain down, the 45-year-old mother tries to shield her children in a cramped hole barely big enough to crouch in.

“Time slows down here,” Ms. Malik said, from her home near El-Fasher’s Hajer Gadou market.

“We sit in the darkness, listening, trying to guess when it’s over,” she said over phone.

For almost two years, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan’s Army have waged a war that has killed tens of thousands.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called it a “crisis of staggering scale and brutality”.

Sudanese paramilitary shelling of El-Obeid on Friday killed six persons, including a child, a doctor said, just weeks after the Army broke a prolonged siege of the key southern city.