Crisis worsens

last updated 8 January 2015

Darfur, Sudan

Another half-million people are fleeing the civil war in western Sudan, the U.N. said this week. The war started last year as a conflict between Arab nomads and black farmers over land and water rights. It now involves the government and three rebel groups, and has left more than 1.5 million people homeless. That figure will rise by another half-million next month, and most of the refugees cannot return even if the war ends. U.N. aid official Tony Hall said that on a recent trip to Darfur, he saw many villages completely burned out and uninhabitable. “They were like ghost villages,” he said. “The houses were destroyed, the land was barren, and the people were gone.”