"If you look in the four corners of the Earth, you wouldn't find a regime as cruel as this one."

SHIGAKARO, Sudan - Hawa Basi, cradling her sick child in the fierce sunlight, has nowhere to go and nowhere to return to.

She lived in the hamlet of Bameshi, not too far from here. But when Sudanese planes bombed a nearby village, she and her three children fled for the hills, forced out as much by the hunger in their bellies as the fear in their hearts.

Now she's too frightened to return to Bameshi and too weak to make the two-week-long journey on foot to the refugee camps of neighboring Chad.

Tens of thousands of others share her plight, hunkered down in rebel-controlled portions of Sudan's Darfur region, in a kind of humanitarian no-man's land.

They spend their nights huddled in caves and bushes, hiding from the bombers, Sudanese soldiers and the state-backed Arab militias, called the janjaweed, that have hunted them for months. They survive on wild roots and the mercy of strangers who are barely better off in villages such as Shigakaro that are protected by rebels.

"We are just waiting for help," said Basi, wearing a blue shawl and a faint smile....

....Ongoing insecurity, overstretched aid workers and a shortage of funding are largely to blame for the lack of aid in rebel-controlled areas.

"Tell them we're suffering from three things - lack of food, (lack of) medicines and the enemy," implored Umda Ali Hassib, the chief of Shigakaro, 70 miles east of Sudan's border with Chad. "If you look in the four corners of the Earth, you wouldn't find a regime as cruel as this one." (Knight Ridder)