Escape from the abyss: Surviving the atrocities in El Fasher

BLURB: No one knows the true toll of the massacre, and the city remains closed to the outside world, although some aid has started to reach other parts of Darfur
The capture of the city of el Fasher in late October marked a bloody milestone in the nearly three-year conflict in Sudan. The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group battling the Sudanese army in a catastrophic civil war, took control of el Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in western Sudan, handing the RSF almost total control of the region.
As it tore through the city, the RSF embarked on a killing spree. Aid groups reported widespread accounts of violence. One chilling video verified by The New York Times shows a fighter executing a survivor of the violence as he begs for his life.
The United Nations’ migration agency estimates that 100,000 people have fled el Fasher since its collapse. That would leave more than 150,000 people still unaccounted for.
No one knows the true toll of the massacre, and the city remains closed to the outside world, although some aid has started to reach other parts of Darfur. One of the few ways to report on the siege is by travelling to refugee camps in eastern Chad, now home to about 900,000 displaced Sudanese from Darfur and other parts of the country.
Only days before el Fasher fell to the RSF, Manahil Ishaq, 35, sent her 14-year old son, Rami, out to look for some food. Rami was not gone long before he was critically wounded in an explosion, his mother said. Neighbours brought him back to the family home.
“He couldn’t speak or say anything,” Ishaq recalled. “His belly was out and his bones were fractured.”
As more fighting erupted, Ishaq, who was three months pregnant at the time, prepared to flee. Rami was still alive, she said, but she knew he would not survive his wounds.
“I told him that I wished him forgiveness and well-being, in this life and the hereafter,” she recalled. Then she left.
Through tears, Ishaq recounted her escape from el Fasher and month-long journey to the Oure Cassoni refugee camp in eastern Chad.
While sitting outside the dusty, rundown hospital in the camp, she said her brother was killed as the family fled. Ishaq said she was shot in the back by a sniper.
Miraculously, the baby she is carrying survived, and she reached the camp with her other children.
Adjusting to the harsh conditions of the camp has not offered her much relief. Oure Cassoni is one of the most remote camps in Chad. It was founded by the government of Chad in 2004, when tens of thousands of people fled Darfur to escape mass killings led by the Janjaweed, the group that was the precursor to the Rapid Support Forces.
The camp has doubled in size over the past year, but support from Chad and international aid have not kept pace with its needs.
Mustafa said he and four of his friends, all in their late teens and 20s, knew they had to leave el Fasher.
He recalled watching four members of his neighbour’s family be executed by RSF fighters as the group took over the city. He requested that only his first name be used for fear of his safety.
Mustafa and his friends made a plan to leave under cover of darkness. But they did not get far before they were captured by RSF troops near the village of Qarni, he said. He and his friends were lined up and questioned.
Two of his friends asked for food and water. Instead, their captors shot and killed them, Mustafa said.
“We were frightened,” he said. “They told us, ‘Calm down, we are not going to kill you.’”
Mustafa and his friends were tied to a tree and left there for two days until local villagers freed them and told them to run. Three survived and made it to the camp. Mustafa stayed in Oure Cassoni. The others went on to Libya.
Hussam Altaher grimaced as doctors at the small hospital in Oure Cassoni cleaned the wound on his leg. While sitting at home with his father and cousins in el Fasher in late August, Altaher suddenly heard a drone overhead.
“I recognised it because we had heard the sound many times before,” he said. “Moments later, the bomb fell directly on our house.” His father and cousins were killed instantly, and Altaher was badly injured.
He spent the next two months in Al Saudi maternity hospital, the last functioning hospital in el Fasher. Doctors struggled to give him proper care because they lacked basic medicine. — The New York Times