SURIN, Thailand: Six-year-old Sunisa Chanprakhon was looking forward to running in her school sports day in their Thai border village on Thursday (Jul 25) when explosions shattered the morning calm.
“We didn’t get to run,” she said in front of a camping tent her mother had set up in a university sports hall now suddenly housing evacuees. “Instead we ran into the bunker.”
Sunisa and her mother, Lukkana Namprakhon, live just 4km from Thailand’s disputed frontier with Cambodia, where the two countries exchanged heavy artillery fire for a second day on Friday in their worst fighting in over a decade.
Both sides have accused each other of starting the conflict, which has killed at least 15 people – most of them Thai civilians – and displaced over 100,000 in Thailand and 1,500 families in Cambodia.
The mother and daughter spent 30 minutes in the bunker before evacuating to a local shelter and then the local university in Thailand’s Surin province, along with 200 other people from the border area.
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