Photo Gallery The Suffering of South Kordofan
A brutal civil war is raging in the Sudanese province of South Kordofan and civilians have been the primary victims. Here, little Mutassir Amdaraman, who lost his arm and his mother in a bombing raid, together with his grandmother.
The region of South Kordofan has been neglected by the government in Khartoum for decades. Now that rebels have taken up arms against President Omar Bashir, civilians have been forced to take shelter from the bombs in caves or beneath rocky outcrops.
A typical road in the region. When Sudan and South Sudan negotiated peace last year, they were unable to reach agreement on what to do about South Kordofan and the Blue Nile province and they were left out of the agreement. War has been the result.
Thomas Catena is the last doctor still working in the hospital of Gidel in South Kordofan. It is the only medical care available for hundreds of kilometers around. A former military doctor from the US, he sees up to 300 patients a day.
In the Gidel hospital, he is known simply as Dr. Tom. "You don't have the option of transferring patients to a better hospital," he says. "You only have the choice of doing it yourself -- or letting them die."
Most of the injuries treated by Dr. Tom are the result of air raids using fragmentation bombs.
