Sudan’s siege city – BBC smuggles in phones to reveal hunger and fear

“She left no last words. She was dead when she was carried away,” says Hafiza quietly, as she describes how her mother was killed in a city under siege in Darfur, during Sudan’s civil war, which began exactly two years ago.
The 21-year-old recorded how her family’s life was turned upside down by her mother’s death, on one of several phones the BBC World Service managed to get to people trapped in the crossfire in el-Fasher.
Under constant bombardment, el-Fasher has been largely cut off from the outside world for a year, making it impossible for journalists to enter the city. For safety reasons, we are only using the first names of people who wanted to film their lives and share their stories on the BBC phones.
Hafiza describes how she suddenly found herself responsible for her five-year-old brother and two teenage sisters.
Their father had died before the start of the war, which has pitted the army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

Source: BBC | Language: English