Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.
Coming to you live from London, I'm Paul Henley.
New intelligence is emerging to suggest that the ongoing civil war in Sudan could be about to get even bloodier.
The paramilitary rapid support forces fighting government troops appear to have built extensive earth barriers around the city of El Fasha,
which is one of the last remaining strongholds of government troops in the western Darfur region.
Nearly 300,000 Sudanese civilians are trapped there with dwindling access to food and medical supplies.
Nathaniel Raymond is executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health.
It uses satellite imagery to chart developments in the war.
And he told me about the fortifications around El Fasher.
The civilians still remaining in El Fasher are being walled in by over 31 kilometres.
of earthen berms that have initially been constructed by the Sudan armed forces.
The rapid support forces have taken over those berms and finished them,
leaving only small choke points,
extorting civilians to basically pay ransom in order to leave the city.
They are producing a killing zone and there's been a great deal of killing in this conflict already,
hasn't there?
That's correct.
We watched the cemeteries in multiple sites across al-Fasher,
Abu Shuk and al-Salam, internally displaced persons camps, grow exponentially.
In some cases,