Sudanese shelter in desert

CAMP IRIDIMI, Chad – Clouds of sand billow around flimsy shelters that dot the parched and desolate plains. As the wind picks up, women lift the folds of their brilliant pink, blue and green veils to shield their faces from the enveloping dust.

Nearly 200,000 terrified villagers have sought sanctuary in one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth, the deserts of Chad, near the border of Sudan. They are some of the more than 1 million people chased from their homes in the past 16 months in what humanitarian workers call a systematic campaign of terror in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Over and over, they tell the same story. First airplanes and helicopters came and bombed their villages. Then gun- and sword-wielding militiamen came galloping in on horse and camelback — burning, looting, raping and killing.

“They killed my husband. They killed my children. They burned my house. They stole my cattle,” Aza Jumah Tedel wept into her veil.

Tedel fled into the desert with her two surviving children, trekking 12 days on a donkey to reach the Chad border. There she waited for a month until the U.N. refugee agency took her by truck to camp Iridimi, about 40 miles west of the border.

“There was no food, no water,” said Dabaiye Omar Saleh, another camp resident whose husband was shot before her eyes in a militia raid. “If we found a puddle by the side of the road, we scooped it up with our hands.”

Tens of thousands have made the same journey, forced on a desperate flight through the desert by Arab herders bent on chasing their African farming neighbors from the vast western region, the size of Iraq.

“The 15,000 people who are here have lost everything,” U.N. Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said as he toured Iridimi with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan this week. “They were bombed, they were hunted down by the most hideous campaign of terror.”