By Virginia Pietromarchi
    Borota refugee site, Chad – The late afternoon sun beat down as a boy, barely three years old, picked up a bullet casing from the dusty ground. In his tiny hands, the shiny war remnant looked like the heaviest of toys.
    Nearby, a group of women emerged from their makeshift shelters fashioned out of bright garments knotted on wooden sticks. A song blared out in the distance - its lively beat at odds with the harrowing stories of murder, escape and agony that are whispered throughout this remote corner of eastern Chad.
    "As the night descended, they came and killed," said Zara Khan Umar, a refugee from neighbouring Sudan's Darfur region who is now sheltering at an informal settlement in Borota. "Any men they find on their way, they kill them."
    The 40-year-old is one of the more than 90,000 people who have trekked across the border in recent weeks to escape the fighting that has gripped Sudan. In mid-April, a rivalry between Sudan's army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo, exploded into war. While the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, has been the main theatre of battle so far, the fighting has also spread in cities across the conflict-weary Darfur region.
    There, the resurgence of violence quickly took an intercommunal dimension, pitting armed Arab men against fighters from the Masalit ethnic group in confrontations that witnesses and survivors described as ferocious.
    While a communications blackout has largely kept cities across Darfur cut off, Al Jazeera spoke to at least a dozen refugees at Borota whose collective account helps shed light on the events of the past month.
    The hastily erected settlement just 5km (3 miles) from the border is now home to about 25,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children. Most refugees here escaped from the town of Konga Haraza in the first two weeks of May after local authorities - some described them as the Sudanese army; others referred to them as the local police - abandoned it. In the absence of security forces, Arab armed groups stormed the town, looting houses and killing residents, mostly men, according to accounts by refugees and aid workers.
    The testimonies are hard to independently verify due to the blackout, but they are similar to those of refugees in other camps who described the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the ransacking of hospitals and the burning of entire neighbourhoods in different parts of Darfur.
    Some Masalit people in Konga Haraza put up a defence despite being outnumbered and having inferior weapons, refugees said. They added that most civilian men stayed behind to try to protect their land or fight.
    But as fighting drags on, smaller waves of refugees keep trickling into Borota from Konga Haraza, each bringing the latest news on relatives back home. Last week, a neighbour informed Umar that one of her five children was wounded. “And now? Is he alive or dead? I don’t know,” she said, her face tightening with pain.
    A few metres away, Salma Hisen Hasan was not pondering such questions anymore. A day before, news had arrived that her husband had been shot dead in el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state.
    “I woke up three times in the night," the 35-year-old said quietly. "[I was] turning my head left and right looking for him,” she added, sitting in the darkness of her shelter, wearing an immaculate white veil.