In a war-ravaged neighbourhood of Sudan's capital Khartoum, the stench from a gaping sewage pit is unbearable as Red Crescent workers pull a bloated body from deep underground.

The volunteers say 14 more remain below.

"They were shot in the head, some have crushed skulls," Hisham Zein al-Abdeen, head of forensic medicine at Sudan's health ministry, told AFP at the scene.

The victims, he said, were either shot or beaten to death before being thrown in.

Behind him, a truck idles, its flatbed already filling with bodies retrieved from the sewer well in East Nile, an eastern district of Khartoum now reduced to ruins.

Nearly two years of war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have left large swathes of the capital unrecognisable.

Once a bustling metropolis, Khartoum has seen well over 3.5 million of its people flee since the war began, according to the United Nations.

Millions more, unable or unwilling to leave, live among abandoned buildings, wrecked vehicles and what the army says are hidden mass graves.

Since April 2023, the conflict has pitted army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan........

© International Business Times