'It was as if the hell's door was opened...we were dying of fear'

Villagers have offered harrowing accounts of one of the deadliest attacks in Sudan's devastating civil war. Samy Magdy of the Associated Press reports

- Samy Magdy of the Associated Press reports

WHEN Ahlam Saeed awoke last month to the sound of gunfire and roaring vehicle motors, the 43-year-old widow rushed outside her home in war-torn Sudan to find a line of at least two dozen vehicles, many of them motorcycles carrying armed fighters.

"They were firing at everything and in every direction," the mother of four said. "In an instant, all of us in the village were fleeing for safety."

Many people were gunned down in their houses or while trying to flee.

At least 200 people were killed, including many women and children, in the community of straw homes, according to a rights group tracking Sudan's civil war.

Saeed and her children - aged nine to 15 - were among those who survived after rebel fighters rampaged through Shaq al-Noum, the small farming village of several thousand people in Sudan's Kordofan region.

In interviews with The Associated Press, Saeed and four other villagers described the July 12 attack, one of the deadliest assaults since the war began more than two years ago over a power struggle between commanders of the military and the rival paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.

The villagers' accounts add to the devastating toll of the conflict, which started in April 2023 and has wrecked the country, in northeastern Africa.

The fighting has killed more than 40,000 people, displaced as many as 14 million, led to disease outbreaks and pushed some places into famine.

Atrocities, including mass killings of civilians and mass rape, have also been reported, particularly in Darfur, triggering an investigation by the International Criminal Court into potential war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The villagers from Shaq al-Noum said RSF fighters and their allied Janjaweed militias stormed into the community, looting houses and robbing residents, especially of women's gold. Some victims were held at gunpoint.