‘Escape or starve': life inside Sudan's city under siege

Times

3 days ago

Orphaned and raising three sisters alone, the youngest just five, Hafiza has only ever known life in a Darfur displacement camp. Born after her parents fled the genocidal Janjaweed militia in the early 2000s, she is now trying to survive the militia's reincarnation — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — as they bombard and deliberately starve the city around her.
The 22-year-old was studying to be an English teacher when Sudan's civil war shut down her university in El Fasher, where she and her sisters are among hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped on a front line between the army and the RSF. Many are in displacement camps where monitors warn famine has already set in and malnutrition has led to at least 60 deaths in the past week.
The girls' mother was killed in front of them last year when a busy market was shelled.
'I've seen ten or 15 people killed at a time from the bombardments,' Hafiza said in a call from the city's Abu Shouk displacement camp. Attacks have intensified in recent months after the RSF was ousted from Sudan's capital, Khartoum. Alongside the bombardments, a slower crisis is unfolding. 'People are also dying more slowly, from starvation,' she said.
Between searching for food for her siblings, who are now severely underweight, Hafiza works at a charity clinic in the camp, cleaning wounds from the latest shelling and holding a phone torch while medics operate.
Aid convoys are blocked, electricity and clean water are non-existent and hospitals have collapsed. International aid organisations have condemned the 'calculated use of starvation as a weapon of war.'
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Since April 2023, Sudan's war has killed at least 150,000 people and displaced more than ten million in what the United Nations calls the world's largest displacement and hunger crisis. Both sides face allegations of war crimes. The United States has formally determined that the RSF and its allied Arab militias are committing genocide in Darfur, accusing them of ethnically targeted massacres and widespread sexual violence against the same black African ethnic groups — including Hafiza's Fur community in Darfur — that were killed in their hundreds of thousands during the genocide of the early 2000s.
The conflict has split the country into rival zones of control and become a proxy battleground for regional and international players, including Russia and the United Arab Emirates. El Fasher is the army's last foothold in Darfur, and its fall would give the RSF control over a vast region bordering Libya, Chad, Central African Republic and South Sudan — and pave the way for what analysts say could be Sudan's de facto division.
El Fasher's markets are now empty save for a few supplies smuggled in by private traders at prices far beyond the reach of most residents. A sack of millet can fetch 7.2m Sudanese pounds (£8,800) and a pound of salt sells for at least 2,400 Sudanese pounds (£2.95)
Those trapped, like Hafiza, face the grim choice of staying in the hope that the siege is broken, or attempting to escape through RSF-controlled territory.
Leaving carries the risk of being killed, enslaved or subjected to the sexual violence that has marked the conflict from the start.
Mahasin, 41, lost contact with her husband in the chaos of the war, in which men and boys of fighting age have been forcibly conscripted or killed. Feeding herself and her four children in El Fasher was becoming impossible. Some days they survived on leaves and umbaz, an animal fodder made from peanut shells and other food waste.
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'Death seemed certain, if not today then tomorrow, from an attack, hunger or disease. When I went out to find food I never knew if I would survive and return to my children,' she said.
While they still had the strength, Mahasin decided they should attempt to reach Tawila, 60km west of El Fasher. The location has become a hub for 380,000 people escaping the city and the nearby Zamzam displacement camp which came under a days-long attack in April in which 1,500 civilians are thought to have been massacred.
But Tawila offers less safety by the day, Mahasin said in a call from the town. Aid is scarce because humanitarian agencies are stretched by foreign funding cuts and the town's scant clean water and sanitation are fuelling the spread of cholera.
On Tuesday, government sources reported that Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan's army chief and de facto leader, met President Trump's Africa adviser Massad Boulos in a secret meeting in Switzerland over a US peace proposal. Past efforts to mediate between Burhan and his deputy turned rival, the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have failed to yield a sustained ceasefire. The two generals, who are fighting for overall power, jointly ousted Sudan's long-time ruler Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and later staged a coup against a civilian-led unity government.