U.N. demands end to El Fashir siege in Sudan’s Darfur region

For more than a year, Sudan has been engulfed in a civil war between the military dictatorship and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful militia that has seized huge swaths of the country.

El Fashir, in the vast, arid Darfur region of the country, is the final regional capital still in government hands, and it has been under siege for the past month. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have sheltered there, fleeing RSF advances elsewhere in the country.

This past week, the RSF and its allies attacked and looted the biggest hospital in the city, while eight young volunteers at a soup kitchen were obliterated by a shell. A local resident described how an ambulance driver was shot and later died as he was trying to help a pregnant woman in a refugee camp.

“This situation is dire and people are terrified … the RSF is all around the city and they are shelling the neighborhoods,” the resident said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

El Fashir is home to 2 million residents and another 800,000 civilians displaced by the fighting.

The Doctors Without Borders humanitarian agency (known by its French initials MSF) was operating in one of the city’s hospitals before it was stormed and looted by RSF members. It said there is now only one hospital still operating in the city.

“Fortunately, most patients had already been evacuated from South Hospital before the RSF raid, and the remaining patients and staff were able to escape,” said Michel-Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergencies, in a statement. “But the fact remains that hospitals have not been spared by anyone.”

The organization said thousands had fled the city to a refugee camp about 10 miles away which already houses 300,000 people. It described the situation inside the city as chaotic and dangerous, making it difficult to evaluate people’s needs and organize support.

In her letter explaining her support for the resolution, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield described the situation in Sudan as “far and away the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”

She said that more than 25 million people — over half the population — required humanitarian assistance. The U.N. has also said some 5 million are on the brink of famine.

Thomas-Greenfield criticized the RSF for blocking aid deliveries and the military government for prohibiting cross-border aid.

“If the warring parties do not respect international humanitarian law and facilitate humanitarian access, the Security Council should take action to ensure lifesaving aid is delivered and distributed, by considering all tools at its disposal,” she said.

In addition to a power struggle between two heavily armed military groups, the fighting has an ethnic element and reprises the conflicts from 20 years ago in the Darfur region that pitted ethnically Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, against Black African rebel groups.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in 2009 for Sudan’s then-president, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, for the campaign in Darfur from 2003 to 2008.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed and is now facing off against the same heavily armed rebel groups around El Fashir amid fears of renewed ethnic cleansing. This year, the former rebel groups announced that they would support the military — their enemy 20 years ago — after nine months of staying out of the civil war.

The former rebel groups have now spread into most of Sudan to support the army, said Gen. Yahya Idris Elnour Ishaq, a member of one of the former rebel factions. “Now we are like this with SAF [the Sudanese Armed Forces],” he said, interlacing his fingers.

After the RSF took another regional capital, El Geneina, Human Rights Watch reported that the militia carried out widespread massacres of civilians. The RSF has denied that it targeted civilians.

On Tuesday, International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan issued a video appeal for evidence of atrocities in Darfur as part of the court’s ongoing investigation.

“The terrible events in West Darfur, including El Geneina, in 2023 are among our key investigative priorities,” he said, adding that evidence to date indicates “prevalent use of rape and other forms of sexual violence” as well as shelling of civilian areas and attacks against hospitals.

Schemm reported from London.