Harrowing journey of the displaced

WHEN paramilitary fighters closed in on the Sudanese border town and oil field of Heglig, paraplegic Dowa Hamed could only cling to her husband's back as they fled, "like a child", she said.

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Now the 25-year-old mother of five - paralysed from the waist down - lies shell-shocked on a cot in the Abu al-Naga displacement camp, a dusty transit centre just outside the eastern city of Gedaref, nearly 800km from home.

But her family's actual journey was much longer, crossing the South Sudan border twice and passing from one group of fighters to another, as they ran for their lives with their children in tow alongside hundreds of others.

"We fled with nothing," Hamed said.

"Only the clothes on our backs."

Hamed and her family are among tens of thousands of people recently uprooted by fighting in southern Kordofan - the latest front in the war between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that erupted in April 2023.

Since capturing the army's last stronghold in Darfur in October, the RSF and their allies have pushed deeper into neighbouring Kordofan, an oilrich agricultural region divided into three states: West, North and South Kordofan.

In recent weeks, the paramilitary group has consolidated control over West Kordofan, seized Heglig - home to Sudan's largest oil field - and tightened its siege on Kadugli and Dilling in South Kordofan, where hundreds of thousands now face mass starvation.