In besieged Sudan city, civilians face death if they try to escape

Ahmed Abubakr Imam armed himself with a rifle to defend his community in January 2024.

As Sudan’s sprawling western region of Darfur advanced in its war against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and its allies, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) advanced by capturing four of its five provinces in a lightning strike.

Taus of people were terrified as a result of the threat to capture North Darfur, including Imam.

He was aware of the notoriously nomadic RSF, which abducted and raped women and girls and extrajudicially murdered men and boys from largely sedentary “non-Arab” communities.

Imam joined the Popular Resistance, a group of neighborhood defense fighters supported by the SAF, like thousands of other non-Arabs in North Darfur.

According to the 27-year-old, “the RSF militia clearly doesn’t distinguish between fighters and civilians.”

Nowhere to go

Since the SAF and the RSF started a full-fledged civil war in April 2023, the latter has almost consolidated control of Darfur, a country that the latter has controlled for years.

According to UN experts and local and international monitors, both sides have committed grave abuses, but the RSF is linked to genocide and systematic sexual violence.

Around 260, 000 people are languishing and dying in el-Fasher, north of North Darfur, under a crippling siege that the RSF laid in April 2024.

Many women, children, and some men have managed to flee to Tawila, a town that is 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of where the devastating cholera epidemic is located.

Those fleeing El-Fasher must pay the equivalent of $300 each to RSF fighters in exchange for their jewelry and other items.

Residents claim that women and children have been kidnapped while men have frequently been detained and killed after the RSF has suspected them to be fighters.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to stay in El-Fasher as a result of these dangers until the RSF is overthrown or the city falls.

“All the civilians would have left El-Fasher by now,” Imam said to Al Jazeera, “if the militia RSF didn’t target civilians.”

Some, like Imam, are on the front lines, while others are attempting to document atrocities for the outside world by gathering food and supplies to feed their geriatric populations.

Imam is the oldest of a number of brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom is only three years old. He fears that if the RSF travels to them, they could all be raped or killed.

He said, “I have a responsibility to protect my family because I’m the oldest sibling.”

Al Jazeera addressed written inquiries to the RSF’s press office informing them of its opposition to claims that it targets civilians fleeing El-Fasher. Before publication, the RSF did not respond.

“Kill box”

The RSF is now making it nearly impossible for people to leave the city, even if they want to, according to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses satellite imagery to monitor developments in North Darfur.

The research team discovered that the RSF has constructed about 31 kilometers (19 miles) of desert berms (barriers) around El-Fasher on August 28.

A semicircle formed by about 22 kilometers (13. 6 miles) from the city’s west to its north, and an additional nine kilometers (9 miles) prevent any attempt to escape east.

According to the Yale report, “RSF is actually building a kill box around El-Fasher with these berms.”

The desert berms, according to journalist Mohamed Zakaria in El-Fasher, are about 3 meters high.

He claimed that all other roads out of El-Fasher have been blocked and that no one can climb the walls without getting them pulled up.

Additionally, he emphasized that residents of the displacement camp in Abu Shouk, northwest of El-Fasher, are deciding whether to stay and face an éventuel RSF attack or to leave knowing the risks.

Around 190,000 camp members have already fled, according to local monitors, according to Al Jazeera, and roughly 80% of them have gone to Tawila or El-Fasher.

People attempting to flee the state-backed “Arab” Janjaweed militias that terrorized non-Arab communities during the first Darfur war in 2003 were able to find housing at Abu Shouk. Many of these militias were later reorganized into the RSF.

In a larger attack that resulted in the deaths of dozens of people, the UN accused the RSF of immediately executing 16 men from Abu Shouk on August 22.

Following the RSF’s April attack on Zamzam camp, south of el-Fasher, which uprooted half a million people and killed more than a thousand, Abu Shouk’s assault is now in progress.

According to Zakaria, “artillery are] shelling Abu Shouk from every direction; they are also carrying out incursions and kidnapping campaigns.”

He told Al Jazeera, “Abu Shouk is the same scenario that happened in Zamzam.”

Starvation

According to UN agencies and local relief volunteers, the RSF’s chokehold siege on El-Fasher is also adding to the city’s natural starvation.

Food stocks are almost entirely exhausted, and drones have recently attacked food convoys, according to the UN.

Families typically rely on tree leaves or a local “ambaz,” an animal feed that is made by pressing the leftovers from peanut and sunflower seeds into a slurry to be consumed.

Even ambaz is starting to run out, warns Magdy Yousef, a resident of El-Fasher and a member of the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), a grassroots initiative that offers assistance to beleaguered civilians.

Yousef claimed that ERRs volunteers are attempting to buy food, operate neighborhood kitchens, and distribute medicine to the city’s most vulnerable residents. Most people can only eat one meal per day at best.

El-Fasher has only five community kitchens, each serving a meal to just 3, 000 people, according to Yousef.

He continued, “We are on the verge of famine.”

Yousef claimed that some families, including those who are elderly, children, and women, are risking their lives every day in El-Fasher because of the extreme hunger there.

He made it clear that men of fighting age, like himself, are too vulnerable to try to flee.

Most young men who leave the city are staying put despite the hunger and starvation [in El-Fasher], according to Yousef, because the RSF is targeting them all.

Source: Aljazeera