"The rains have completely destroyed my house," said Jaafar Beshir, his feet drenched by a river of mud, just one of thousands of residents of a Khartoum suburb forced out by violent storms.

"I built this little mud wall to protect us from the floods in the roads," said the young father of five, who comes from the Nuba mountains in central Sudan and today lives in the impoverished neighbourhood of Soba Aradi.

Christians, Muslims, southerners, Darfuris, merchants and servicemen from the four corners of the vast African country all live in the suburb dotted with mudbrick houses, without proper sanitation, running water or electricity.

The rainy season brought with it a host of problems for the capital, which sits at the junction of the White Nile and the Blue Nile, with poor areas of Khartoum hardest hit.

The downpours -- the heaviest in decades -- transformed roads into rivers, gouged craters from the rare stretches of tarmac, severed roads and flattened thousands of homes.

"The roof of my house caved in after only 30 minutes of rain," said Mustafa, who was forced to put together a makeshift wooden shelter until he can rebuild the parts of his modest home that were destroyed.

"Some 21,000 families have had their homes totally or partly destroyed," said Khalil Samani, an official with the Sudanese Red Crescent.

But government officials dispute these figures.

"There are no more than 4,000 houses destroyed," Hassan Abdallah, minister of infrastructure for Khartoum state, told AFP.

Samani fears the sanitary situation will become even worse. "There is a lack of drinking water" for those families affected, he said.

Residents of Khartoum's poor districts who buy their drinking water from sellers who operate using donkey carts complain of the increased cost since the floods, which have made water deliveries more difficult.

In several areas of the capital there is no sewerage system, and waste is mixed with rain water, increasing the chances of infection and diarrhoea.

Several days since the most recent rains, roads in the Jabal Awliyya, Assalama, Soba, and Soba Aradi neighbourhoods as well as some areas of the capital's twin city of Omdurman are still inundated with swampy water.

"See the houses that are destroyed over there? People have left. They may come back in two weeks," said Mahmud, pointing to the flooded part of Soba Aradi, an "illegal" area of Khartoum the authorities sought to redevelop in 2005, sparking violent clashes between police and residents.

The government of the State of Khartoum has announced school closures because of the rains and has also promised aid to the victims, but scepticism about help remains high.

"I can only count on myself to fix the damage," said Insaf, a teacher in a kindergarten which was damaged in the storms.

earlier related report
Three die in Niger floods after heavy rain in desert
At least three people died in floods following torrential rain in the historic northern Niger town of Agadez, a rare occurrence in the middle of a desert region, local authorities said.

The victims were carried away by flood waters after the heavy rains on Tuesday night, a resident of the town told AFP by telephone on Wednesday after local official Amadou Boukata gave local journalists the death toll.

Some 3,500 houses collapsed as several districts of the town were flooded, with two hospitals and a police station damaged.

The flood cut off the military barracks from the rest of the town.

Heavy rain is extremely rare in the deserts of northern Niger where certain districts hardly experience any rainfall.