The conflict in Sudan may have been pushed from the headlines by new disasters, but for hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee their homes, their misery shows no sign of getting any better. Paul Willis reports from a shanty town many now have to call home.

IT is a 20 minute drive out of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, to the shanty town of Souba. On the way into this community of makeshift homes, made of everything from flattened-out cardboard boxes to empty rice sacks, we pass the shell of a building on our right.

"That was the police station," my guide Ali tells me with a wry smile. The police headquarters here was destroyed by local residents in retaliation to attempts by the army to evict them from their homes in May this year. Over 6,000 soldiers backed by nearly 50 trucks with machine guns mounted on the back arrived in the camp in the early morning and in the ensuing battle over 30 civilians and soldiers lost their lives.

The attack on Souba and the place itself are part of a story that is being repeated on a much larger scale and with far more brutal consequences hundreds of miles west of here in the region of Darfur.

Most of the residents in Souba are refugees from that area. The majority of them fled here in 2003 when the conflict in their homeland and the ensuing humanitarian crisis was making headlines around the world.

Since then the focus of the world community may have shifted elsewhere - to Iraq, to the US and Hurricane Katrina. But these people, and the crisis they ran away from, have not gone away.

More than 2.5 million people have fled their homes and at least 180,000 are thought to have been killed since the conflict in Darfur began nearly two years ago.

In much of Darfur all of the villages have been abandoned as Arab militias - known as Janjaweed - have driven them from their land.

The refugees are black farmers, though the distinction in Darfur between black and Arab seems to be more tribal than racial or religious - there is little to tell them apart and many of the blacks are also Muslim.

MANY inside and outside of Sudan blame the hardline Islamic government here for the continuing crisis in Darfur.

Not only is the government of the military leader Omar Al Bashir accused of arming the Janjaweed militias but army helicopters and troops have frequently taken part in attacks on villages.

The plight of Darfur refugees in Souba seems to attest to a cruel lack of concern and hostility on the part of Bashir's government.

There is no electricity here, no government schools or hospitals. The women, many of them widowed by the conflict, make a meagre living collecting firewood, which they sell on for a pittance. They cannot afford to send their children to school so they are educated by volunteers - sitting on the bare earth they repeat lessons by heart because they have no exercise books or pens to write with.

Perhaps it is no worse here than many other parts of this impoverished continent but when you consider what these people have had to endure, it seems all the more cruel that their escape has led them to this. Ali, himself a Darfurian, leads me into a small courtyard to meet some of the women. I ask him if they will mind me taking their picture.

"Don't worry," he says. "They want to talk to you, they want you to tell the world what has happened to them."

No-one is helping these people, and it shows. They look tired, their haunted faces a stark contrast to their colourful hijabs. The stories they tell me are depressing and inspiring in equal measure.

Halima Isa, a 30-year-old from West Darfur, witnessed her parents being murdered when her village was attacked. She said the Janjaweed arrived late in the afternoon.

"If the man had a watch on his hand," she tells me. "They made him take it off and give it to them, then they killed him. For the small children they asked if it was a boy or a girl and if it was a boy, they killed him."

She describes witnessing young girls being gang raped, their genitals mutilated by their attackers.

Another woman, Mariam Abdul Shivai, tells me how she and her husband and their two children walked for ten days before they made it to a town after their homes were destroyed.

They scavenged for food and survived by drinking water from streams. But the saddest and most horrific thing of all about these disturbing stories is that they are still going on.

Sudan's government seem either unwilling or unable to rein in the Janjaweed, whilst peace talks between rebels for the Sudan Liberation Army - who represent the black farmers - and the government have made little difference to the situation on the ground.

THE conflict in Darfur has not ended and though the violence may have been scaled-down it is ongoing and brutal. Masaad Ali is a human rights lawyer working in Nyala, South Darfur, for the Sudan Organisation Against Torture (SOAT).

He says: "If the number of attacks on villages have gone down that is only because there is no-one living there now. They are all in the refugee camps."

Mr Ali says the camps, which are home to most of the region's estimated 1.8 million population of internally-displaced people, were increasingly the targets of militia attacks. He says there was almost no security around camps meaning refugees were left totally vulnerable.

There are three camps around Nyala, all at least ten kilometres from the town, which are home to over 250,000 refugees.

Women searching for firewood on the outskirts of the camps were particularly at risk and Mr Ali says his organisation had recorded three rape cases there in the last week. He says: "The attacks all follow the same pattern. A group of usually between five and six militia men attack the women and beat them and rape them before setting them free.

"It is no good telling these women to stay in the camps because they have to collect firewood to cook, otherwise they will starve."

THE camp's security is meant to be under the authority of Sudanese police, who are monitored by a civilian police force from the African Union, acting as peacekeepers in the region. However Mr Ali says in reality government police do nothing to protect the camps, whilst the AU officers have neither the mandate nor the means to take action against the militias.

He says: "The local police don't care and the African Union simply don't have the power - their police officers don't carry weapons so they couldn't intervene even if they wanted to. The camps are a long way out of the towns and frequently the Arab militias will stay only a few kilometres from them, so the refugees are left totally vulnerable, like sitting ducks."

So far the international community has ruled out sending a NATO force to the area despite warnings that the conflict there could not be resolved unless more troops were committed to the region.

The leading think-tank the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report published last month that the AU should be given more powers and its troop level brought up in order to intervene to protect citizens.

A few weeks ago, three African Union peacekeepers were killed in attacks thought to have been carried out by SLA rebels. Mr Ali says despite the recent peace talks the security situation around the camps was worsening.

He says: "The problems of Darfur are not going away. The international community must act to help these people because if they don't, then who will?"