By Shoon Naing
SURIN, Thailand (Reuters) -Six-year-old Sunisa Chanprakhon was looking forward to running in her school sports day in their Thai border village on Thursday 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 4 km (2.4 miles) 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.
Schools in the area are closed, and farming, the lifeline for most villagers in this agrarian part of Southeast Asia’s second largest economy, has halted.
Jeenjana Phapan, a 48-year-old farmer, said she fled her village with her three-year-old son after shells landed in the rice field behind their house, while her husband stayed behind to care for their cows and guard their home.
Villagers have dug bunkers in case of renewed shelling. “I hope my husband can hide if more shells come,” she said.
Thailand has accused Cambodia of targeting civilian areas with artillery and rocket barrages, while Cambodian officials say a Thai F-16 jet fighter hit non-military targets during a cross-border attack on Thursday. Both countries deny the charges.
Decades-old disagreements over jurisdiction of undemarcated points along their 817-km (508-mile) land border have led to skirmishes over several years, including a weeklong exchange of artillery in 2011.
This time, the volleys of gunfire appear to be worse, said Lukkana, who tends a garden alongside looking after her home.
“All you could hear was the sound of explosions,” she said.
(Reporting by Shoon Naing, Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal, Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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