Sudanese seek refuge underground in besieged city

EL FASHER: 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.

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

“Time slows down here,” 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 told reporters by 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.”

El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, is the only major city in Darfur still under army control, making it a strategic prize.