Special Report: Inside Sudan

Darfur's devastation

At least 170,000 to 255,000 people have died as a result of the continuing conflict in western Sudan, according to a new analysis of surveys conducted in refugee camps that concludes many previous death toll estimates were too low.

DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS

A war against leprosy

The shriveled woman with pale eyes and rags cloaking her thin frame held out the flesh-and-bone knob that used to be her hand. Flies covered the scabby, reddened stump, but she was oblivious to them, unable to see the buzzing pests with her blind eyes and unable to feel them with the deadened nerve endings left where her fingers once were.

DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS

Struggles of the South

On a sweltering afternoon, the university clock tower reads 8:55, just as it has for years. It is a symbol of a dilapidated city stopped in time, along with the fans that hang motionless from ceilings of most buildings, and the rusted wreck of a boat run aground in the dark, muddy Nile, a few feet from where women wash clothes in the murky water.

DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS

Lives in limbo at Sudan camp

For three months, in the late stages of pregnancy, Debeza Yar walked on bare feet through southern Sudan, heading east from Western Equatoria province. Her destination was Bor, her hometown on the White Nile River, which civil war had emptied years earlier.

UN accord on Darfur

In a rare show of unanimity, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution yesterday intended to speed the deployment of UN troops into Sudan's war-torn Darfur region to enforce a new peace accord.

A flawed peace pact

The tattered tents stretch as far as the eye can see on the edge of town. The narrow paths buzz with weary-looking people, bleating goats and whining donkeys hauling rickety wooden carts, a vision almost medieval in its wretchedness.

Starved for a solution

A 5-month-old boy who, at 7 1/2 pounds looked as fragile as a newborn, sucked formula through a thin tube positioned against his emaciated mother's chest. Some day, when his mother is able to provide milk to nourish her son, it is hoped he will have learned to associate her breast with food and be weaned from the tube.

DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS

Where the Despair Begins

In the three years and three months since war erupted in Darfur, an isolated region in western Sudan, hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been forced from their homes. On May 5, the Sudan government and one of three rebel groups reached a U.S.-brokered peace agreement raising the prospect for an end to Darfur's agony Now the region's fate hangs on whether other rebel groups sign the accord and whether the United Nations is able to deploy peacekeepers to this embattled area.

DARFUR: INSIDE THE CRISIS

Using rape as a weapon of war

The gunmen eyed the 11 women for a few moments, as if scanning a menu. Then they chose three: Buthereina Hassab el-Dama, her sister and their cousin.

Factions that are factors in Darfur

JANJAWEED: Translated from Arabic as "armed man on a horse." Though the government says the janjaweed are independent thugs over whom it has no control, international investigators say they are fighters recruited by the government from nomadic, Arab-dominated tribes to fight alongside soldiers.

Students show concern about atrocities in Sudan

Mercedes Smith of Elmont had something to say. And, like others who sometimes don't agree with coverage in the newspaper, this Newsday reader voiced her complaint in a letter to the editor.

Sudan peacekeepers sought

Sudan's president still has not accepted the deployment of UN peacekeeping troops in the country's war-torn Darfur region, Bush administration officials said yesterday, something that could hinder implementation of a deal to end the 3-year-old conflict.

Too little, too late in Darfur?

The Bush administration led last week's efforts to push the warring parties in Sudan's Darfur region to sign a peace deal, but critics of the United States' handling of the crisis say it should have been far more aggressive two years ago when it first declared the war a genocide.