Those who have fled the western city of el-Fasher in wartorn Sudan are recounting scenes of horrific violence at the hands of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as aid workers say they fear only a fraction of the besieged city’s residents have managed to escape.
The RSF has killed at least 1,500 people in el-Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, since seizing it Sunday – including at least 460 at a hospital in a widely-condemned massacre.
More than 36,000 people have fled since Saturday, largely on foot, to Tawila, a town around 70 kilometres (43 miles) west that is already sheltering roughly 650,000 displaced people.
Hayat, a mother of five children, told the AFP news agency via satellite phone that seven RSF fighters ransacked her home, searched her undergarments and killed her 16-year-old son in front of her.
As she fled with neighbours, “we saw many dead bodies lying on the ground and wounded people left behind in the open because their families couldn’t carry them,” she recalled.
Another survivor named Hussein was wounded by shelling but made it to Tawila with the help of a family carrying their mother on a donkey cart.
“The situation in El-Fasher is so terrible — dead bodies in the streets, and no one to bury them,” he said. We’re grateful we made it here, even if we only have the clothes we were wearing.”
Aisha Ismael, another displaced person from el-Fasher recounted to The Associated Press news agency: “Shelling and drones (attacks) were happening all the time. They hit us with the back of the rifles day and night unless we hid in the houses. At 3 in the morning we sneaked outside the houses till we arrived Hillat Alsheth (area in north Darfur) where we were looted. They left us with nothing, I came here barefoot, even my shoes were taken.”
But aid workers in Tawila say they’re still waiting for most of el-Fasher’s supposed evacuees.
Mathilde Vu, advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which manages the Tawila camp, told the Associated Press “the number of people who made it to Tawila is very small”.
“Where are the others?” she said. “That tells the horror of the journey.”
The United Nations moved to approve a $20 million allocation for Sudan from the Central Emergency Response Fund to help scale up response efforts in Tawila and elsewhere in Darfur, UN Secretary-General spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday.
The UN was “horrified” by the slaughter of more than 450 people at Saudi Hospital, where patients, health workers and residents had sought shelter, Dujarric added.
Elderly people, the wounded and those with disabilities remained “stranded and unable to flee the area”, he said.
Shayna Lewis, a Sudan specialist, told Al Jazeera the massacre of civilians was “most devastating because we in civil society have been warning the international community for over a year about the atrocity risks for the civilian population of North Darfur”.
For 18 months before Sudan’s army withdrew from the city, an RSF siege had trapped hundreds of thousands of people trapped inside without food or essentials.
What’s most “astonishing”, Lewis added, was the ability to see the bloodshed from outer space: Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) reported satellite imagery shows clusters of objects consistent with human bodies and large areas of red discolouration on the ground.
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