Crawling to escape slaughter, people flee Sudan paramilitary group on their hands and knees
“Many of them tell us that they had to hide for days in the desert, crawling on their elbows to avoid being spotted, targeted and kidnapped,” Saraf said Thursday at a press briefing from the city.
While El-Fasher is subject to a communications blackout, it is up to eyewitness accounts like Musa’s, videos shared on social media and analysis of satellite imagery that can reveal the scale of what is happening in the key regional capital, which was home to around 250,000 people before the Sudanese army left.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health, said that after studying high-resolution satellite images, he concluded there were “too many” bodies to count.
But he estimates that tens of thousands of people were killed after RSF fighters captured the town about two weeks ago, following the withdrawal of the Sudanese army.
“Operations to dispose of bodies have accelerated,” he said, adding that his team had found evidence of mass graves and burned bodies in El-Fasher.
NBC News asked RSF for its comments on the latest satellite analysis. An RSF official told Reuters on Friday that investigations were ongoing and anyone found to have committed abuses would be held accountable, but that reports of violations in El-Fasher had been exaggerated by the army and its allies.
Widespread abuse
Led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo – a former camel trader widely known as Hemedti – the RSF has been fighting the Sudanese army for more than two years after he fell out with the country’s commander-in-chief and de facto ruler, General Abdel-Fattah al Burhan.
Before that, the two men were part of the military establishment that helped topple longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Two years later, they agreed to govern together after a coup that brought down the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
However, their alliance collapsed spectacularly over how to handle the transition to civilian government, and as neither seemed willing to cede power, fighting broke out.
Since then, both sides have been accused of widespread abuse. In one of its latest acts, the Biden administration declared that the RSF and its allies were committing genocide in a war that has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with part of the country, including the El Fasher region, plunged into famine. More than 14 million people have fled their homes.
With so many people displaced and a lack of reliable data, estimates vary widely on the death toll, but in May the United Nations said 40,000 people had been killed. Humanitarian groups say the real death toll could be several times higher. More than 24 million people also face acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Program.
RSF said Thursday it would accept the truce “in order to address the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the war and to strengthen the protection of civilians.” The ceasefire would “ensure the urgent delivery of humanitarian assistance to all Sudanese,” the group added of the proposal put forward by a group of mediators known as the Quad and made up of the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
