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.”
About 50,000 refugees from Darfur live in the Ourang camp in eastern Chad.
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. Officials say these acts are a continuation of the mass killings two decades ago that prompted worldwide protests and high-visibility outrage from celebrities like George Clooney and Don Cheadle. They’re being revived amid a broader war for control over Sudan—Africa’s third-largest country—between the country’s two most powerful generals.
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Author: Ruth King
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