Fate of thousands feared in Darfur after reported rampage by Sudanese paramilitary force

Audio By Carbonatix

CAIRO (AP) — Sudanese fleeing a paramilitary force that seized a city in the country’s Darfur region trickled into a nearby refugee camp Thursday after walking for miles, telling aid workers that roads were littered with bodies. Aid groups feared for the fate of thousands more trying to escape, with hundreds reportedly killed in the turmoil surrounding the city's fall.

The U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting on Sudan amid international alarm over the bloodshed. During the takeover of the city of el-Fasher, paramilitary gunmen reportedly killed more than 400 people in a hospital.

Speaking at the meeting, U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher criticized the Security Council for not acting sooner in Sudan. The country has been torn for the past two years in a war between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that has killed more than 40,000 people and left more than 14 million displaced.

“Can anyone here say we did not know this was coming?” he said. “We cannot hear the screams, but as we sit here today the horror is continuing. Women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed with utter impunity.”

U.N. officials, aid groups and survivors have spoken of widespread killings after the RSF this week captured el-Fasher, the military's last stronghold in Sudan's Darfur region. A U.N. fact-finding mission on Sudan said in a statement Thursday that initial investigations point to deliberate pattern of ethnically targeted executions of civilians, sexual violence and mass forced displacement.

The capture of el-Fasher by the RSF raises fears that Africa’s third-largest nation may split again, with the paramilitaries holding Darfur and the military holding the capital, Khartoum and the north and east of the country. Nearly 15 years ago, oil-rich South Sudan gained independence following years of civil war.

The U.N. migration agency said over 36,000 have reportedly fled el-Fasher since Sunday, with people leaving on foot in the middle of the night during the RSF attack. Experts analyzing satellite imagery say an earthen wall built by the RSF around the city is preventing residents from fleeing and has become a “kill box” where some appear to have been shot.

Only thousands have arrived at Tawila, a town some 60 kilometers (35 miles) west of el-Fasher. Tawila has already burgeoned into a sprawling refugee camp housing hundreds of thousands who fled the RSF's siege of el-Fasher over the past year.

Malthide Vu, advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which manages the camp, said the small number reaching Tawila in recent days "should be a concern for all of us ... That tells the horror of the journey.”

The International Rescue Committee said those arriving in Tawila told its aid workers that there had been arbitrary killings by RSF forces along the roads out, which were littered with bodies.

“Hundreds of thousands of people are in grave danger in and around el-Fasher,” the IRC warned,

In Tawila, the newly displaced were sheltering under trees or using blankets or their own clothes as covers from the elements. One person who fled, Aisha Ismael, said she arrived barefoot, with none of her belongings as drone attacks and shelling were constant. People foraged for livestock fodder known as ambaz, which is made from peanut shells and water, because they were so hungry.

“We looked for it in the dirt to eat and they didn’t even let us. If they catch us, they hit us and throw it away,” she said. “We were tired from hunger.”

Disrupted communications around el-Fasher has made assessing the devastation inside the city difficult. Witnesses have told The Associated Press that RSF fighters went from house to house, beating and shooting people, including women and children.

Some 460 patients and their companions were reportedly killed Tuesday at the Saudi Hospital in el-Fasher, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. The AP has not been able to independently confirm the hospital attack and death toll, given the chaos and the challenges in communicating with those still there.

The RSF on Thursday denied carrying out killings at the hospital.

A report from the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab said satellite imagery from Airbus corroborated alleged killings by the RSF around the Saudi Hospital, and a children's hospital that the RSF turned into a detention center months ago. The AP accessed and analyzed the same imagery, seeing objects and red stains on the ground at the sites that the lab identified as blood and bodies.

Images at the children's hospital-turned-detention center taken Monday showed a line of people standing in the yard; imagery from Tuesday showed "a pile consistent with human remains,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale research lab. “We think those are people who were killed at the detention center.”

The Yale researchers also said that “systematic killings” took place in the vicinity of the earthen wall, which the RSF built outside the city earlier this year.

“The entire city is surrounded by a berm. It is a kill box, to trap them, to kill them,” said Raymond.

The head of the RSF, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who is sanctioned by the U.S., acknowledged on Wednesday what he called “abuses” by his forces and said an investigation was ongoing.

But on Thursday, the RSF issued a statement calling the reports of killings at the hospital “fabrications for political gain" by their enemies.

After the military drove the RSF out of Khartoum in April, the paramilitary has focused on Darfur, particularly el-Fasher, which its forces had been besieging for more than 500 days.

The RSF is largely made up of fighters from the Janjaweed militia that committed genocide in the early 2000s in Sudan's western Darfur region. Rights groups and the United Nations accuse the RSF and allied Arab militias of again attacking ethnic African groups in this latest war.

Since the war began, both the Sudanese military and the RSF have faced allegations of human rights abuses. Before U.S. President Joe Biden left office, the State Department declared that the RSF committed genocide in this current war.

___

Amiri reported from the United Nations. AP correspondents Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Toqa Ezzidine in Cairo, and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.