Several thousand civilians fled the Sudanese town of Abyei after renewed clashes in the disputed oil district where fighting this year raised fears of a return to civil war, officials said on Sunday.
"The general population, because of the sensitivity of the area and because of the experience of what happened in May, don’t want to hear any shot of the bullet. It scares them," Abyei chief administrator Arop Moyak told AFP.
The region of Abyei, with its estimated half-billion dollar oil wealth, lies on the faultline between north and south Sudan with borders still unresolved more than three years after a peace agreement ended decades of civil war.
"Those who left is not less than 3,000, but there is a sign that some of them are coming back," Moyak said.