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02-11-2025
KHARTOUM: Abubakr Ahmed was ready to die on the soil he had fought so hard to defend from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
For 550 days, he fought as a member of the “popular resistance”, a neighborhood group formed to help the army and aligned armed groups protect el-Fasher from the RSF, their rival in the two-and-a-half-year civil war.
The besieged city was the last army stronghold in the sprawling region of Darfur, until it fell on October 26.
According to Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army surrendered and negotiated the safe exit of its troops in the hope of stopping a bloodbath but their withdrawal left 250,000 people starving and beleaguered civilians to face the RSF alone.
Ahmed remembers “shooting” his way out of the city with a handful of young men from his unit. During the final clashes, shrapnel hit Ahmed in the abdomen after a rocket-propelled grenade blew up a car nearby.
He managed to escape, unlike so many others.
“The RSF killed civilians and left their corpses in the streets,” Ahmed, 29, told Al Jazeera after he had escaped el-Fasher.
“They were killed without mercy.”
Mass exodus
In the first three days after capturing el-Fasher, the RSF killed at least 1,500 people, according to the local monitor Sudan’s Doctors’ Network. The figure includes the killings of 460 patients and their companions from the local al-Saud hospital, which has also been verified by the World Health Organization.
Al Jazeera’s own verification unit, Sanad, authenticated several videos that showed RSF troops standing over a pile of dead bodies or executing a row of unarmed young men.
The mass killing has prompted more than 33,000 people to flee already, with many arriving in nearby towns and villages such as Tawila and Tine, about 60km (37 miles) away.
However, most civilians remain trapped in el-Fasher, hiding from RSF gunmen.
Others are still making the long and exhausting trek through the open desert to reach safety, likely separated from friends and loved ones and without anything to eat or drink.
One survivor, Mohammed, said that he reached Tawila on October 28 and that he expects tens of thousands of new arrivals to show up soon.
Like most inhabitants from el-Fasher, Mohammed is from one of the sedentary “non-Arab” tribes that has historically been persecuted by the nomadic “Arab” tribes that make up the majority of the RSF.
“The majority of people won’t stay in el-Fasher because they are terrified of the RSF. “They don’t trust the RSF because they know they will be persecuted by them,” Mohammed told Al Jazeera.
“The Arabs will live in one place and the non-Arabs in another. That’s just the way it is now, unfortunately,” he added.
Echoes of Rwanda
RSF’s leader, Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, said in a speech on Wednesday that he promises to investigate reports of “abuses” taking place but survivors say the killing in el-Fasher appears to be a systematic attempt to ethnically cleanse the non-Arab population.
The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which provides satellite analysis of the fighting in Darfur, said in a report on October 28 that there was clear evidence that the RSF was killing people en masse as they tried to flee. (Al Jazeera)
