'Nowhere is safe' - Cameroonians trapped between separatists and soldiers
BBCNgabi Dora Tue, consumed by grief, was barely able to stand on her own.
The coffin of her husband, Johnson Mabia, sat amid a crowd of stricken mourners in Limbe in Cameroon's South-West region - an area that had witnessed scenes like this many times before.
While on a work trip, Johnson - an English-speaking civil servant - and five colleagues were captured by armed separatists.
The militants were - and still are - fighting for the independence of Cameroon's two anglophone regions in what is a predominantly francophone country. A near-decade-long conflict that has led to thousands of deaths and stunted life in the area.
When he was abducted four years ago, Dora struggled to reach Johnson. When she eventually heard from separatist militants, they asked for a ransom of over $55,000 (£41,500) to be paid within 24 hours in order to secure his release. Dora then received another call from one of Johnson's relatives.
"He said… that I should take care of the children. That my husband is no more. I didn't even know what to do. Tuesday he was travelling, and he was kidnapped. Friday he was killed," says Dora.
The separatists responsible had not just murdered but decapitated Johnson, and left his body on the road.
AFPThe roots of the separatist struggle lie in long-standing grievances that stretch back to full independence in 1961, and the formation of a single Cameroonian state in 1972 from former British and French territories.
Since then the English-speaking minority have felt aggrieved at the perceived erosion of rights by the central government. Johnson was just an innocent by-stander, caught up in an increasingly brutal fight for self-determination and the government's desperate attempts to stamp out the uprising.
The current wave of violence began almost a decade ago.
In late 2016, peaceful protests started against what was perceived to be the creeping use of the francophone legal system in the region's courtrooms. The French- and English-speaking parts of Cameroon use different judicial systems.
The protests rapidly spread, and led to a call for the closing of shops and institutions.
The response of the security forces was immediate and severe - people were beaten, intimidated and there were mass arrests. The African Union called it "a deadly and disproportionate use of violence".
Cameroon's defence ministry did not respond to requests for comment on this or other issues in this article.
Armed groups were set up. And, in late 2017 as tensions escalated, anglophone separatist leaders declared independence for what they called the Federal Republic of Ambazonia.
To date, five million anglophone Cameroonians have been dragged into the conflict - equivalent to one-fifth of the total population. At least 6,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes.
"We used to wake up in the morning to dead bodies on the streets," says Blaise Eyong, a journalist from Kumba in the English-speaking South-West region of Cameroon, who has produced and presented a documentary on the crisis for BBC Africa Eye, and was forced from his hometown with his family in 2019.
"Or you hear that a house has been set ablaze. Or you hear that someone was kidnapped. People's body parts chopped off. How do you live in a city where every single morning you're worried if your relatives are safe":[]}