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 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 AFP 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.
The RSF has tried for months to seize it.
Malik’s crude shelter, held up by splintered wooden planks and scraps of rusted metal, is one of thousands in the war-battered city, according to residents.
The army regained much of the capital Khartoum this year, but the RSF has intensified its attacks on El-Fasher.
Desperate for safety from artillery and drone strikes, residents have built makeshift bunkers.
Some are hurriedly excavated foxholes, others are more solid and reinforced with sandbags.
Mohammed Ibrahim, 54, once believed hiding under beds would be enough, “until houses were hit”.
“We lost neighbours,” he said by phone. “The children were terrified.”
Determined to protect his family, Ibrahim dug a hole in his yard. He covered it with sacks of soil with only a narrow entrance.
