As a youngster, barely three years old, picked up a bullet casing from the dusty ground, the late afternoon sun blazed down. The gleaming battle relic appeared like the heaviest of toys in his little palms.
A group of ladies emerged from their improvised shelters made of colored clothes tied on wooden sticks nearby. In the distance, a song blared out, its upbeat beat at contrast with the horrible stories of murder, escape, and misery that are whispered across this lonely part of eastern Chad.
"They came and killed as the night fell," said Zara Khan Umar, a refugee from neighboring Sudan's Darfur area who is now living in an informal camp in Borota. "Any men they come across on their way, they kill."
The 40-year-old is one of the more than 90,000 people who have trekked across the border in recent weeks to escape the fighting that has gripped Sudan. In mid-April, a rivalry between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, exploded into war. While the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, has been the main theatre of battle so far, the fighting has also spread in cities across the conflict-weary Darfur region.
There, the resurgence of violence quickly took an intercommunal dimension, pitting armed Arab men against fighters from the Masalit ethnic group in confrontations that witnesses and survivors described as ferocious.
Looking for him
While a communications blackout has largely kept cities across Darfur cut off, Al Jazeera spoke to at least a dozen refugees at Borota whose collective account helps shed light on the events of the past month.
The hastily erected settlement just 5km (3 miles) from the border is now home to about 25,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children. Most refugees here escaped from the town of Konga Haraza in the first two weeks of May after local authorities – some described them as the Sudanese army; others referred to them as the local police – abandoned it. In the absence of security forces, Arab armed groups stormed the town, looting houses and killing residents, mostly men, according to accounts by refugees and aid workers.
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The testimonies are hard to independently verify due to the blackout, but they are similar to those of refugees in other camps who described the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the ransacking of hospitals and the burning of entire neighbourhoods in different parts of Darfur.
Some Masalit people in Konga Haraza put up a defence despite being outnumbered and having inferior weapons, refugees said. They added that most civilian men stayed behind to try to protect their land or fight.
But as fighting drags on, smaller waves of refugees keep trickling into Borota from Konga Haraza, each bringing the latest news on relatives back home. Last week, a neighbour informed Umar that one of her five children was wounded. “And now? Is he alive or dead? I don’t know,” she said, her face tightening with pain.
A few metres away, Salma Hisen Hasan was not pondering such questions anymore. A day before, news had arrived that her husband had been shot dead in el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state.
“I woke up three times in the night,” the 35-year-old said quietly. “[I was] turning my head left and right looking for him,” she added, sitting in the darkness of her shelter, wearing an immaculate white veil.
No return
West Darfur has long been the stage for intercommunal violence between Arab and Black African communities, such as the Masalit. In 2003, what used to be competition over water and land turned into a brutal war as Sudan’s then-President Omar al-Bashir armed Arab militias to suppress a rebellion led by non-Arab communities. Human rights groups have accused the militias – nicknamed the Janjaweed, or “evil horsemen” – of carrying out mass atrocities. Al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes during the years-long conflict, which killed 300,000 people.
In 2013, al-Bashir repackaged the Janjaweed into the RSF under the leadership of Hemedti. In the years that followed, the paramilitary commander went on to acquire an increasing central role in Sudanese affairs. In 2019, Hemedti collaborated with the military to topple his former boss before orchestrating a coup with al-Burhan two years later that upended Sudan’s fragile transition towards democracy.