Unreported World

Terror in Sudan (2012x1)

Air date: Apr 13, 2012

As George Clooney campaigns against the atrocities being committed in Sudan, Unreported World has filmed extensive documentary footage from the war zone. Aidan Hartley and Daniel Bogado gained rare access to the Nuba Mountains to film the heroic doctors who are saving children in a largely hidden war being perpetrated on civilians by one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. The Nuba Mountains region, in the South Kordofan oil fields upriver from Khartoum, is a troubled part of Sudan where a civil war has continued since the 1980s. Nuba always fought alongside its southern black African Christian neighbours against the Arab Islamic regime in Khartoum, but the region was left behind in the peace accord that led to the independence of South Sudan in mid-2011. In June 2011, President Omar al-Bashir's forces launched fresh attacks against opposition supporters in Nuba, many of them Christians and black Africans. The Unreported World team highlights how government forces are carrying out almost constant aerial bombardment of civilian settlements, driving them from their fields so they cannot grow crops, while banning relief deliveries by international agencies. As soon as they arrive in Nuba, Hartley and Bogado are caught in an air raid by Sukhoi ground attack jets firing rockets as terrified families dive into foxholes while explosions rumble in the surrounding villages. In another incident soon after, the team films traumatised children running into caves to hide from Antonov bombers. The impact of Khartoum's refusal to allow medicines into Nuba is clear as doctors are forced to carry out operations on shrapnel-wounded children without anaesthetics and almost no medicines apart from traditional herbs. Hartley and Bogado visit the Catholic Mother of Mercy hospital, the only functioning hospital for a million civilians trapped by the war. Made for 80 beds, it has 500 patients. The situation is so dire that even the medical staff are not eating