For people previously targeted by the RSF, it is hard to square the brutal past with the current reality which came only shortly after the RSF carried out a campaign of indiscriminate killing in the Nuba Mountains.
Many witnesses or victims of those massacres live in displacement camps across the Nuba.
Huda Hamid Ahmad, a 31-year-old mother of seven, arrived at al-Hilu camp in September 2024, months after fleeing a brutal attack by RSF forces on her hometown of Habila that January.
“They came to the homes, torturing, looting, and threatening to kill your children,” Huda said, recalling the January assault.
Accessible only by rough mountain roads, Habila is about 70km (40 miles) from al-Hilu and has been a main site of intense fighting and ethnic targeting in South Kordofan since the 2023 war started.
Huda’s journey was far from direct. After escaping Habila, she briefly resettled in Kortala, but was forced to flee again when the RSF launched another offensive in September and food supplies ran out.
Her husband had made his way to al-Hilu earlier in the year, shortly after the initial attack, hoping to farm and send food back to the family after their land in Habila was looted and made unsafe.
The family was finally reunited in the fall, after Huda and her children escaped Kortala with other civilians, but the trauma of what they witnessed still lingers.
Fatima Ibrahim, 52, fled her village of Fayu, also in January last year, after RSF fighters arrested her husband.
She heard from neighbours that soldiers demanded he sell his tractor to pay them off, but he hasn’t been seen since, nor has their 19-year-old daughter, the couple’s only child.
“I don’t even want to know what happened,” she said, her voice heavy. “I fear the worst,” she added, referring to stories she’d heard of girls taken into sexual slavery.
She fled with her 82-year-old mother and her late sister’s three children – two young girls, 10 and 12, and their 17-year-old brother.
For nine months, they travelled from village to village, displaced by attacks, until they reached an artisanal gold mine where her nephew stayed to work, while the remainder of the family eventually reached al-Hilu in October.
Her mother broke her hip at one point as the family fled, an injury that has healed but left her reliant on a cane and on Fatima’s support to move around.
Some Nuba residents have privately said they hope the alliance can bring peace, or at least more protection, after the warring parties attacked civilians and blocked international aid for the past years.