BANGUI, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC—The conflict gripping this country unfolds along Avenue de L’Indépendance and ends at a makeshift camp where 7-year-old Habiba Hassan is trapped.

To get to this neighbourhood known as PK12, cars must negotiate the market bustling with Christian merchants, drive through an African Union checkpoint, past two French military tanks and down a stretch of road where thugs are said to roam.

Habiba lives in a crowded hut. Hundreds of other civilians, mainly women and children, are taking shelter nearby in other homes, in the mosque, or setting up camp outside on the red dirt. If they walk 400 metres in any direction, they will likely be killed. Each week, they bury the dead or treat the injuries of those who venture too far.

“Will you please take us out of this hell? Every day we hear, ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,’ but tomorrow never comes,” says Ibrahim Alawad, a 52-year-old lawyer and the de facto leader of the camp.

Giuseppe Loprete, chief of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) mission in the Central African Republic, agrees the situation is dire. “They have to go; this is not a question. They are surrounded. There are grenades every day. The situation is out of control.”

Last week, IOM officials visiting PK12 came under attack, forcing French forces to intervene and secure their passage out.

The problem with evacuation is to find a safe exit route and then secure a place outside Bangui, the capital, where the people can settle. The recent exodus of Muslim residents has shifted problems elsewhere, to the north or to neighbouring countries.

PK12 is at the heart of the crisis that has divided the Central African Republic (CAR) roughly along religious lines, pitting the country’s majority Christian population against its Muslims. There is no history of this religious strife — neighbourhoods are mixed and marriages between the faiths are common.

But the violence that has been simmering for more than a year reached a peak in December when 1,000 people were killed in just two days, and the United Nations warned this week that a genocide looms.

Today, it is Muslims who are under threat. Last year, it was predominantly Christians who were attacked by a largely Muslim militia that took power last March in a coup. This loose coalition of Seleka forces ruled with impunity for 10 months, raping, looting, killing, burning villages and giving rise to vigilante squads that called themselves anti-balaka, meaning anti-machete in Sango, the local language.

International pressure eventually pushed the Seleka from power in December and Muslim civilians were sent fleeing. The UN says only 1,000 of the 13,000 Muslims who once lived in the capital remain, although that number is disputed as being too low.

“The conflict is not about religion,” UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said Thursday as he stood alongside the CAR’s Catholic archbishop, an imam and the president of the Islamic council. He called the meeting with the top religious leaders at UN headquarters in New York a “powerful symbol of their country’s long-standing tradition of peaceful coexistence.”

The Security Council is considering the secretary general’s proposal to send a UN deployment of 12,000 to bolster the contingent of 6,000 African Union and 2,000 French troops, who have been unable to stop the retributive justice in the CAR.

They may even be powerless to stop a massacre at PK12.

Protecting PK12 is the responsibility of Burundian troops, who are part of the African Union mission known as MISCA. And yet they are outnumbered by the loose coalition of anti-balaka and criminals who claim Seleka fighters are hiding among the women and children.

Habiba solemnly pulls up her sarong to reveal a scar running down her thigh.

Her aunt explains that her family is from Bossembélé, about 170 kilometres northwest, and they were forced to stay in a mosque for protection during the fighting earlier this year. She was sleeping when the anti-balaka descended one day in January. Habiba was shot in the leg, and awoke with her grandmother to find the rest of her family — mother, father and five siblings — dead.

“I just cried and I cried. I could not move,” she says in Sango, in a barely audible voice.

Habiba and her grandmother were two of the few survivors, and with little left, they came to Bangui.

Where they go from here is fraught with problems, says Loprete. Not only must the IOM secure the road out of Bangui, but it must also ensure that the evacuees’ destination is safe. Most want to go near the borders of Chad and Cameroon, where few, if any, humanitarian organizations operate.

The mistakes made by the Chadian government when it evacuated thousands of its citizens from CAR, some from PK12, illustrate the challenge. On Feb. 18, the Chadian army sent too few trucks to PK12 — room for only a couple of hundred people — and in the desperation and panic that followed, five children were crushed to death.

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Amy Martin, deputy head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says others have died when Chadian convoys were attacked on the road. “For us, it’s about movement with dignity and safety … the Chadian army wasn’t waiting for the trucks to be fixed, and they did have incidents where trucks broke down and armed groups attacked immediately.

“This is the pattern in the past, so safeguarding the move to another location is critical.”

Alawad estimates 2,750 are seeking shelter, although some put the number much lower. It is difficult to be certain, as dozens live crammed into homes or fill the mosque at night. A citywide curfew prohibits evening visits and as grenades are thrown daily into the camp, venturing near the camp’s borders invites an attack.

“The longer they stay,” says Loprete, “the higher the risk, and the higher the possibility something will happen.”

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