‘The road is full of dead’: Sudanese escape one hell and fall into another

“The road is full of dead,” said Osman Yousif, speaking from the town of Tawila in Darfur, Sudan’s vast western region. “Every few kilometres, you find six, five or four bodies. You have to hide from the fighters. You duck from them in one direction, and then you find them in another.”

Yousif escaped from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State, last Sunday, the day it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The city had been under siege for 18 months and hit by famine. Roughly 260,000 people were believed to be sheltering there. But very few made it to the safety of Tawila, 30 miles away.

“They’re not anywhere near the numbers we were expecting to see,” said Arjan Hehenkamp, Darfur crisis lead for the International Rescue Committee. “Why haven’t they come? Where are they? What is happening to them?”

Aid workers fear vast numbers of weak, malnourished people are hiding in the desert with nothing to eat or drink. Concerns are mounting for those still inside El Fasher. Videos circulated online show RSF fighters summarily killing unarmed men on the edge of the city and walking among piles of bodies.

The UN reported last Wednesday that 460 patients, relatives and medical staff had been killed at Saudi mat­ernity hospital, El Fasher’s last functioning health facility. Satellite images studied by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab appear to confirm the account. They show objects near the hospital “consistent with the dimensions of a human body”.

Similar objects have appeared in clusters at various locations in El Fasher since the RSF took it. “On Monday, for example, a t one detention facility that was formerly a children’s hospital we watched a line of people standing out in the open,” said Nathaniel Raymond, the head of the Yale research lab. “By Tuesday those people were no longer standing there. And there was a pile that had appeared in the corner. What we believe is all those people are dead.”

Jalala Aldeen Abdelrahim, another resident of El Fasher, said he was near the Saudi maternity hospital. “The scenes? I can’t describe them,” he said. “They took 10, 20 individuals and, boom, they shot them in the head. They gave them one shot, two shots.”

Abdelrahim was shot a few kilometres from the safety of Tawila by fighters who stole his possessions and left him for dead. He also spoke to The Observer from Tawila, where he is receiving treatment.

The fall of El Fasher effectively partitions Sudan between the RSF in much of the west of the country and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the east, including the capital, Khartoum. The warring rivals came to power together in a coup in 2021 but fell out over an internationally backed plan to move towards civilian rule.

The ensuing war has created the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. More than 30 million people need aid, nearly 12 million have been displaced and at least 150,000 people have been killed. The true death toll is likely far higher, with several parts of the country hit by famine.

It is a conflict fuelled by outsiders jockeying for regional influence and Sudan’s rich gold reserves. Egypt, Turkey and others are said to have provided arms to the military, which is also accused of war crimes. UN investigators and others have uncovered extensive evidence that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is funding and arming the RSF. The support includes Chinese drones and howitzers, according to Amnesty International. The UAE denies the allegations and continues to participate in peace initiatives.

El Fasher has been a key front in the war since November 2023. The RSF had tightened its siege on the city in recent months, digging a trench and building a berm, or raised bank, around it. Residents were reduced to eating animal feed as supplies ran out. The RSF also began deploying more advanced weapons, including drones and anti-aircraft systems that blunted SAF air support for its fighters in the city.

Sudanese military leader Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said the army had withdrawn from El Fasher “to spare the civilians and the rest of the city from destruction”, vowing to avenge crimes committed by the RSF.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias that carried out a genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. Similar patterns of violence have occurred during the current conflict, with the US accusing the RSF of genocide.

According to a leaked UN report, the RSF and its allies killed 10,000 to 15,000 people when they captured the town of El Geneina in 2023. The killers singled out people based on their ethnicity and skin colour, often referring to them as “slaves”.

For more than two years observers have been warning of the potential for bloodshed on a similar scale in El Fasher, the last major city controlled by the military in Darfur. But with the world’s focus trained on Ukraine and Gaza, little was done to prevent it.

“We have been using the highest level of technology to document every excruciating step to this moment,” said Yale’s Raymond. “This is the single most accurately predicted and warned mass atrocity in history.”

With communications to El Fasher cut, it may be months before the full scale of the violence becomes clear, but footage verified by Human Rights Watch offers glimpses of what has unfolded there.

In one video, an RSF fighter crouches beside a man in civilian dress lying on the ground with a bandage on his upper right leg as he pleads for mercy. “I will have no mercy on you. We are here to kill,” says the fighter before shooting the man five times with a rifle.

Another video shows dozens of bodies, some in military uniform, lying in a trench. An RSF fighter is heard in another video shouting: “We don’t give guarantees to prisoners.” The footage was geolocated by Human Rights Watch to the berm encircling the city.

RSF commander Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo acknowledged “violations” by his troops. Last Thursday, the RSF published a video detaining a fighter who appeared killing unarmed men in several videos.

Another resident of El Fasher described walking for two days through the desert without water to reach Tawila. She asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. Twenty members of her family are still missing. Like other survivors, she is anxiously waiting for news. “I don’t know if they are alive or dead,” she said.

Photograph by Mohammed Jammal/UNICEF via AP