Horrendous. From the front page of the Wall Street Journal Friday.
Her chest tightening in panic, Taiba Hassan Adam watched as a group of men splashed gasoline on the small brick and grass house. Their comrades kept their rifles trained at her. Hassan Adam’s three youngest children—10-year-old Mohamed, 8-year-old Awadia and 7-year-old Faiz—were stuck inside.
Moments earlier, the gunmen had moved chairs to block the building’s one metal door. Then they dropped matches into the shimmering liquid.
Hassan Adam had hoped the house would shelter her family from a wave of attacks in Sudan’s Darfur region. Now it was on fire, and all she could do was pray that her children would somehow find a way out.
“We will shoot you if you try to go in,” she says the men shouted at her and the other adults they held in the house’s yard. As the screams of her children broke through the flames, the men, Hassan Adam says, started to cackle.
“They were just laughing,” says Hassan Adam, still stunned into grief in a sprawling refugee camp in Chad, across the border from her Sudanese homeland. “They knew there were children inside.”
Hassan Adam’s story is just one in a grim pattern of atrocities perpetrated by mostly Arab fighters against Darfur’s Black indigenous communities over the past 11 months.,,,
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Through interviews with more than four dozen refugees in makeshift camps near the Chad-Sudan border, as well as aid workers, diplomats and international experts monitoring the violence in Darfur—a mineral-rich region roughly the size of Spain—The Wall Street Journal has documented abuses against civilians on an industrial scale.
It's a long and awful article - two of the three children in the house died.
A new report by U.N. investigators estimates that fighting between Arab militias and poorly armed self-defense forces from the Black Masalit community in the West Darfur city of El Geneina killed as many as 15,000 people between mid-April and June last year. A massacre in a camp of internally displaced Darfuris in November claimed as many as 2,000 lives, the report says.
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Based on images captured on June 28 by a global fire monitoring system run by the U.S. National Space Agency, researchers at the Yale lab estimated that the fires set in Murnei affected an area equal to around 280 football fields.
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Nearly all survivors interviewed by the Journal reported having their phones stolen by the RSF and its allies as they fled El Geneina and other towns in Western Darfur. Experts investigating the violence believe that was part of a strategy aimed at preventing footage of atrocities and their perpetrators from reaching the outside world.
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But Mohamed, the 10-year-old boy who loved to run and joke, remains haunted by the memories of the fire that killed his siblings, Hassan Adam says. So does she. “I will hear them screaming in my head until the day I die,” she says.
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