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

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.

The U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting on Sudan amid international alarm over the bloodshed. U.N. officials have warned of a rampage by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces after it took over the city of el-Fasher, reportedly killing more than 450 people in a hospital and carrying out ethnically targeted killings of civilians and sexual assaults.

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 by a war between the military and the RSF 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.”

As the U.S. and others at the gathering called for an end to “external support” for the warring parties, Sudan’s representative accused the United Arab Emirates, a top American ally, of backing the RSF. The Gulf nation has denied reports it provides weapons and funding to the paramilitary forces. A U.N. panel of experts in 2024 said it found the reports credible.

The RSF had been besieging el-Fasher, the last military-held stronghold in the Darfur region, for the past 500 days. Its capture raises fears that Africa’s third-largest nation may split, with the paramilitaries holding Darfur and the military holding the capital Khartoum and the north and east of the country.

A terrifying escape

The U.N. migration agency said over 36,000 have reportedly fled el-Fasher since Sunday, with people fleeing on foot in the middle of the night. 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.

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

The new arrivals told aid workers that there were arbitrary killings by RSF along the roads, which were littered with bodies, the International Rescue Committee said. Save the Children said arriving women described hiding with their children in trenches or abandoned buildings inside el-Fasher to escape fighters, then being attacked and robbed by armed men as they left the city.

Vu said the vast majority of those arriving in Tawila are women, or families headed by women, as well as large numbers of children separated from their parents. Some among the arrivals were injured, many were malnourished.

Some women reported rapes as they fled, Vu said.

“Men are just not arriving. Either they were killed, disappeared or lost along the way,” she said.

In Tawila, the newly displaced sheltered under trees. One woman, Aisha Ismael, said she arrived barefoot with none of her belongings amid constant drone attacks and shelling. 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.

Reports of killings in el-Fasher

Disrupted communications around el-Fasher has made assessing the devastation inside the city difficult. Witnesses 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.

The RSF on Thursday denied carrying out killings at the hospital. It said it had arrested a number of individuals accused of committing violations during the seizure of el-Fasher.

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. It also analyzed images of a children’s hospital that the RSF turned into a detention center months ago and found “a pile consistent with human remains” in the yard.

“We think those are people who were killed at the detention center,” the lab's executive director Nathaniel Raymond said.

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.

External support

At the Security Council gathering, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea condemned “the horrific violence occurring in el-Fasher.” She repeated Washington's stance that the RSF and its allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.

She said American officials are working to secure “an immediate humanitarian truce and halting external support” for the violence in Sudan.

The military — which opponents say is linked to Sudanese Islamist groups — and the RSF were previously allies in ruling Sudan, until they fell out in a struggle for power in 2003. Both sides have faced allegations of human rights abuses.

But rights groups and the United Nations have accused the RSF and allied Arab militias of repeated mass killings of civilians and widespread rapes, mainly targeting non-Arab communities. The RSF is largely made up of fighters from the Janjaweed militia that committed genocide in the early 2000s in Darfur.

Egypt, where the military dominates the government, gives political backing to the Sudanese military, seeing it as a more reliable ally in the neighboring nation.