"The roads are full of corpses": say survivors of the siege of Al Fashir

BarcelonaMass rapes. Roads littered with bodies. Summary executions. Torture. Robberies. Kidnappings. Extortion. This is the macabre list of atrocities recounted by survivors who have managed to flee the Sudanese city of Al Fashir in recent days. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia has seized control of the city. who had been brutally besieging them for a year and a half.This town, the capital of the province of North Darfur, has gained a sad notoriety: the paramilitaries clashing with the Sudanese army Since April 2023, they have sown terror with extreme violence.

"We woke up trembling with fear; the images of the massacre haunt us," explains Amira. She is one of six survivors who participated this week in a video conference organized by the US-based organization Avaaz. Amira recounts how she first fled from Al Fashir to Korma, a city about 40 kilometers to the northwest, and describes a "massive" scale of rapes. She also says that her 15-year-old son saw FSR militants executing several men.

Many of these massacres were recorded by the paramilitaries themselves in videos they released to proclaim their victory, as if they were trophies.

"The stories we hear are devastating. People tell us they have spent days hiding in abandoned houses or fields, fleeing the bombings. They have seen neighbors and relatives being taken away to the checkpoints“Some were arrested, others were executed on the spot,” says Shashwat Saraf, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Sudan. “The roads to Tawila are full of corpses; they say the stench follows them for miles,” he explains to ARA via email from Tawila, where many residents of Al Fashir are fleeing and where there are already more than 650,000 displaced people, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration. Tawila had already received a wave of displaced people earlier this year from Zamzam, the largest in the Darfur region.

According to Saraf, some 6,000 people have managed to reach this city in the last week, while tens of thousands are estimated to have fled Al Fashir. "But what's even more revealing is who is arriving," she warns, explaining that at the NGO's reception center, approximately one in eight families has children who are not their own. "That means their parents have disappeared along the way, possibly killed, detained, or separated at checkpoints, and other families are taking them in so they won't be alone." "It's a silent indicator of how many are missing; it suggests that a large number of civilians are still trapped between Al Fashir and Tawila: hiding in villages, unable to pass through checkpoints, detained, or killed before reaching safety."

A survivor recounted walking for 18 hours from Al-Fashir to Tawila, about 60 kilometers, passing bodies all along the road: "Every time armed men appeared, they hid in the trees until it was safe to move again. One group moved again to reach Tawila."

"At our reception center, women wait all day, watching each group of men arrive. As soon as they arrive, they rush to try to recognize a husband, a son, a brother, or a father. Many don't find them. Their only hope is that their loved ones will appear in the next group," Sar narrates.

The Sudan War Monitor website, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and Skynews, has published an investigation featuring eyewitness accounts from Sudanese army soldiers and with evidence of numerous crimes against civiliansincluding ethnic killings, house-to-house massacres, arrests, and kidnappings for ransom. "They wouldn't let us leave unless we paid one million Sudanese pounds (about 300 euros)," explains Amira, in another testimony collected by Avaaz.

According to this investigation, two sources from the paramilitary group have confirmed that they have carried out systematic massacres based on ethnicity. Although estimates of the number of victims vary, sources from the RSF indicate that there are at least 7,000 deaths, mostly civilians from the city.

"The Rapid Support Forces selected 18 people and shot them; then they asked us to bury them," explains Abdelhamid Al Hadi, a 35-year-old man who escaped from Al Fashir on October 27 with his wife, in Sudan War Monitor. "They took us to the school, where they selected people again and took them away," she says, adding that there are still hundreds of people detained at this center.

Hospital Massacres

Paramilitaries have also attacked civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and killed hundreds of patients. The World Health Organization reported last week the killing of at least 460 patients and their companions at the Al Fashir Saudi Maternity Hospital. Mohammed worked in the cafeteria of this hospital, the only one still operating in the city: "There were bombings every day," he explained in the Avaaz video conference. "We couldn't even go out to get food," he recounted. "One of my sons died in a bombing at home, and another while shopping at the market."

Giulia Chiopris, a pediatrician with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Tawila, says that most of the patients they receive are adults with gunshot wounds or injuries caused by torture or bombings, but they also receive a large number of children suffering from acute malnutrition. "In recent months, food has been scarce in Al Fashir, and many children have had to eat animal feed, according to their mothers," she says in a voice message released by the NGO. She also laments that the number of cases of sexual violence the MSF team has treated in recent months is "especially high."

Hunger spreads

The international body responsible for monitoring global food security has declared a famine in Al Fashir and also in Kadugli, another besieged city in southern Sudan. The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) system warned this week of the imminent risk of the same occurring in twenty more areas of the country. According to the report, more than 21 million people (45% of the population) face critical levels of food insecurity, and at least 375,000 are in catastrophic conditions, facing extreme hunger, acute malnutrition, and death.

“Even if you had money, there was no food. From morning till night, the children cried from hunger,” explains a survivor from Al Fashir in a voice message on Avaaz. Another witness, Khamisa, explains how the situation worsened in the weeks leading up to the FSR’s capture of the town: “We couldn’t even find animal skins to eat.”