Sudan war: Torture, rape and forced starvation as paramilitaries suffocate besieged city

Faces marked by terror and torment fill North Darfur’s displacement camps.

Their eyes fill with despair as they describe what they have survived during a 16-month siege on one of Sudan’s oldest cities.

It has entrapped their loved ones and spread armed violence, leaving village after village burnt to the ground.

Extreme cases of torture, rape and forced starvation are shared again and again in horrifying detail.

Women collapse into sobs as they contemplate the future and the elderly raise their hands to the sky, trembling and empty, to pray for overdue relief.

In shelters which have seen little to no humanitarian aid, camp directors hand us lists showing requests for clean water, medical supplies and food. Even the trademark white United Nations tarp is scarce.

Some frayed tent material is used to close the gaps in the stick-lined walls that surround the traditional huts displaced families have built for themselves.

They use them as a temporary refuge from the battles that rage for control of the regional capital, Al Fashir.

Instead of fleeing into nearby Chad, they wait here for news that the siege has been lifted and that they may finally be able to return.

But that news may never come.

‘We could hear some of them being killed’

As the bombs drop on Al Fashir, war-wounded civilians travel by road to the last functioning hospital in the state. But the beds in Tina Hospital are largely empty.

The facility cannot afford to provide free or subsidised treatment to the people that need it.

“It is so difficult. This hospital cannot care for a patient without money,” says Dr Usman Adam, standing over an emaciated teenager with a gunshot wound in his stomach.

“We need support.

“Either medication or money to the victims – by anyhow, we need support.”

In nearby camps, women are grieving brothers, fathers, and husbands killed, missing or still trapped inside Al Fashir. Many of them were forced to face RSF torture as they tried to escape.

“If you don’t have money to pay ransom, they take you inside a room that looks like an office and say ‘if you don’t have anything we will kill you or worse'” says 20-year-old mother Zahra, speaking to us at a girls school in Tine that is now a makeshift shelter.

“They beat the men, robbed them and whipped them. We could hear some of them being killed while we women were rounded up on a mat and threatened. We gave them money, but they took the other girls into a room, and we couldn’t tell if they were beaten or raped.”

The women around her on the mat echo Zahra’s anguish.

“They beat us, tortured us, humiliated us – everything you can imagine!” one yells out in tears.

A mother named Leila sits next to her four children and stares down at the ground. I ask her if she has hope of returning to Al Fashir, and she starts to say no as the women nearby yell “Yes! We will return by the grace of God.”

Leila complies with weak affirmation, but her eyes have the haunting resignation of permanent loss. Her city, as she knows it, is gone.

Babies and young children silently stare out from their laps. Many of them wear the signs of physical shock. An older woman on the mat tells us her infant grandson was blinded by the extreme conditions of their escape and takes us to see him and his mother in their hut.

“We fled Al Fashir to Tawila camp while I was heavily pregnant,” says Nadeefa, as her son Mustafa cries on her lap, unable to focus his eyes.

“After I had given birth, we made the journey here. Mustafa was only 16 days old and could not handle the harsh conditions. As time went on, we realised he couldn’t see. We think he was blinded as a newborn on the road.”

Her mother and mother-in-law sit on the mat next to her and take turns trying to calm Mustafa down. Her mother-in-law Husna tells us that her own son, Mustafa’s father, is missing.

“We don’t know where my son is,” she says. “He disappeared as we fled.”

‘They killed my children’

An elderly woman, Hawa, approaches us in the same yard with her own story to tell.

“These people [the RSF] killed my children. They killed my in-laws. They orphaned my grandchildren. They killed two of my sons.

“One of my daughters gave birth on the road and I brought her with me to this camp. I don’t have anything,” she says, trembling as she stands.

“They raped my two younger daughters in front of me. There is nothing more than that. They fled from shame and humiliation. I haven’t seen them since.”

Dr Afaf Ishaq, the camp director and emergency response room (ERR) volunteer, is sobbing nearby.

“I have dealt with thousands and thousands of cases, I am on the verge of a mental breakdown,” she says.

“Sometimes in the morning, I have my tea and forget that I need to eat or how to function. I just sit listening to testimony after testimony in my head and feel like I am hallucinating,”

Everyone we speak to points to her as a source of relief and help, but Dr Ishaq is largely carrying the burden alone. When haphazard financial support for the ERR community kitchens ends, she says people flock to her complaining of hunger.

Dr Ishaq lives in the camp by herself after fleeing her home in Khartoum at the start of the war in April 2023. She says she quickly escaped after her husband joined the RSF.

Since then, she has been constantly reminded of the atrocities committed by her husband’s ranks in Khartoum, her hometown Al Fashir and the ethnic violence they are carrying out across the region.

“The RSF focuses on ethnicity,” she says. “If you are from the Zaghawa, Massalit, Fur – from Darfuri tribes – you should be killed, you should be raped.

“If they find that your mother or father are from another tribe like Rizeigat or Mahamid – they won’t rape you, they won’t touch you.”

A message for the West

In January, the Biden administration determined that the RSF are carrying out genocide in Darfur 20 years after former US secretary of state Colin Powell made the declaration in 2004.

But the designation has done little to quell the violence.

Sudan’s government has accused the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of supplying arms and logistical support to the RSF. The UAE denies these claims but many on the ground in Darfur say its role in this war is accepted as fact.

The silence from the UAE’s allies in the West, including the UK and US, is felt loudly here – punctuated by gunfire and daily bombs.

Dr Ishaq’s distress ratches up when I ask her about neglect from the international community.

“I direct my blame to the international community. How can they speak of human rights and ignore what is happening here?

“Where is the humanity?”