Up to 30,000 people, mostly women and children, have been displaced by fighting into the garrison town of Malakal in Upper Nile, Sudan, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the capital, Khartoum. A regional analyst told IRIN that up to 75,000 people were believed to have been displaced by conflict in the nearby Shilluk kingdom, which pits government-backed Nuer and Shilluk militias against the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The vast majority of the IDPs were women and children, who had arrived in the town with scant personal belongings, reporting looting, burning of villages, killing and rape, especially around Tonga, about 75 km west of Malakal, according to Nadia. The men are believed to have scattered into "the bush" to protect their cattle.