Escape From the Abyss: Surviving the Atrocities in El Fasher
>Only days before El Fasher fell to the R.S.F., 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. Neighbors brought him back to the family home.
>“He couldn’t speak or say anything,” Ms. Ishaq recalled. “His belly was out and his bones were fractured.”
>As more fighting erupted, Ms. 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 telling him.
>Then she left.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 R.S.F. almost total control of the region.
As it tore through the city, the R.S.F. embarked on a killing spree. Aid groups reported widespread accounts of rape and sexual violence.
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 traveling to refugee camps in eastern Chad, now home to about 900,000 displaced Sudanese from Darfur and other parts of the country.
While sitting outside the dusty, rundown hospital of Oure Cassoni refugee camp in eastern Chad, Ms. Ishaq said her brother was killed as the family fled. Ms. 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 militia that became 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 twenties, knew they had to leave El Fasher.
He recalled watching four members of his neighbor’s family be executed by R.S.F. 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 R.S.F. 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.’”
He and his friends were tied to a tree and left there for two days until local villagers untied them and told them to run. Three survived and made it to the camp. Mustafa stayed in Oure Cassoni. His two friends 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, Mr. Altaher suddenly heard a drone overhead.
“I recognized it because we had heard the sound many times before. Moments later, the bomb fell directly on our house,” he said. His father and cousins were killed instantly, and Mr. 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.
Mr. Altaher was still unable to walk by the time El Fasher fell to the paramilitary group. His mother, who had been by his side at the hospital, secured a donkey cart to help them escape on Oct. 26.
‘’’Two days later, more than 400 patients were reportedly massacred at Al Saudi by R.S.F. troops, according to the World Health Organization.’’’
Mr. Altaher and his mother were detained by R.S.F. fighters as they fled. “They demanded 20 million Sudanese pounds to let us go,” he said.
Relatives outside of Sudan paid the steep ransom, roughly $5,600.
Before reaching permanent camps like Oure Cassoni, many Sudanese pass through Tine, a small border town about 100 miles south in Chad.
Several hundred refugees gathered in Tine in late November. Among them were two young men: Ali Ishag, in a wheelchair, and his friend Yahia Rizig.
Mr. Ishag had lost a leg in an airstrike on his family home in El Fasher last year, he said. The same attack killed his entire family.
When it became clear that the city would fall, Mr. Ishag and Mr. Rizig looked for a way out. They decided to leave at night, only days before the city was captured.
“We’re like bats, have to move only at night. If they find you in the morning, they will cut you,” said Mr. Rizig, recalling their escape. Mr. Ishag was unable to walk quickly enough on crutches, so Mr. Rizig carried his friend out of the city on his back.
Having reached Chad, they planned to pass through Tine to a more permanent camp farther west. As a convoy of trucks prepared to depart, Mr. Rizig once again lifted his friend to embark on the next part of their journey away from Darfur.
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