‘A Choice Between Starvation and Death’: Sudan’s Forgotten Siege

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – In the besieged and battered city of El Fasher, the last bastion of resistance against a relentless paramilitary force in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, the final vestiges of hope are being ground into a sludgy, desperate paste. At the city's last functioning hospital, which has been bombed over 30 times, between 30 and 40 severely malnourished children arrive every single day, their emaciated bodies a testament to a city being systematically starved into submission. There is nothing to give them. Instead, they are fed pressed peanuts, a coarse feed normally reserved for cows, camels, and donkeys. "Even we’re eating animal feed," Dr. Omar Selik, a doctor at the hospital, confided during a rare and harrowing video call, his camera tilting to show his own meager meal. "There’s nothing else."

This grim tableau, captured in a searing report by Declan Walsh for The New York Times, offers a visceral and deeply disturbing window into what aid groups are calling the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.

El Fasher, a city of immense strategic and symbolic importance, has become the worst battleground of Sudan’s brutal civil war. For nearly 18 months, it has been under a tightening siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who have erected a 20-mile-long earthen wall around its boundaries to cut it off from the outside world.

The war in Sudan, which erupted more than two years ago as a power struggle between the country's army and its paramilitary rival, the RSF, has engulfed Africa’s third-largest country, killing tens of thousands, forcing an estimated 12 million people from their homes, and triggering a major famine.

Since the RSF was expelled from the capital, Khartoum, in March, the group has redoubled its efforts to capture the vast western region of Darfur, the traditional homeland of many of its fighters. El Fasher is the last major city standing in their way.

For the estimated 260,000 civilians still trapped within the city's confines, life has become a dire and impossible set of choices: stay, and risk being starved or bombed; run, and risk being killed, robbed, or sexually assaulted by the fighters who roam the perilous road to safety. "People seem to have forgotten us," Dr. Selik said, his voice breaking with emotion during the video call. "Oh my God, it’s a very painful story."

The conditions inside the city are catastrophic. According to Taha Khater, one of the few aid workers remaining, a single kilo of pasta now sells for an astronomical $73, ten times its normal price. His group, the Emergency Response Rooms, has recorded the deaths of 14 children from malnutrition in the past two weeks alone, and the specter of cholera is now spreading through the weakened population.

The United Nations has not been able to deliver any food to El Fasher in over a year. The few aid convoys that have attempted the journey have been attacked by drones, with one strike in June killing five aid workers and another last month forcing the convoy to turn back.

Escape is a life-threatening gamble. Young men attempting to flee by scrambling over the earthen berm at night have been summarily executed by fighters, Mr. Khater reported. The 40-mile journey to the town of Tawila, where international aid groups are still able to offer some help to the more than 600,000 refugees now crowded there, is a gantlet of terror.

"The road is lined with hastily dug graves and abandoned bodies," Sylvain Penicaud, the head of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Tawila, said by phone. "They are just left there." Rape is a constant and brutal feature of this journey; the hospital in Tawila treats about 40 sexual assault victims every week, a number that Mr. Penicaud says is "nothing compared to the true rate."

While Sudan’s military has also been accused of widespread war crimes, including bombing raids on crowded markets near El Fasher, only the RSF has been accused of genocide. This month, United Nations investigators determined that the long list of atrocities committed by its troops in El Fasher amount to crimes against humanity.

The conflict has been exacerbated by foreign involvement, with The New York Times reporting that the United Arab Emirates has supplied the RSF with guns, drones, and medical support. This month, Sudan’s military-led government submitted a dossier to the UN Security Council accusing the Emirates of hiring a group of Colombian mercenaries, known as the Desert Wolves, to fight alongside the RSF, a claim the UAE has dismissed as a fabrication.

At the center of this maelstrom of violence and starvation is the Al Saudi hospital, the last of what were once 200 medical facilities in El Fasher.

Here, a handful of besieged medics are hanging on, sustained by a vanishing supply of medicines and a profound sense of duty. Dr. Suleman, a senior doctor who asked to be identified by only one name due to death threats, recounted the worst of the more than 30 strikes on the hospital—a drone missile that tore into a crowded ward in January, killing 70 patients and staff. Today, the doctors are forced to shelter in foxholes during bombing raids.

The animal feed they are forced to give their malnourished patients, known locally as "ambaz," is a desperate and dangerous solution, prone to fungal contamination that has reportedly killed at least 18 residents in recent weeks. "But there is no other option," Dr. Suleman said.

As the RSF pushes deeper into the city, fears of an ethnic massacre are growing. Human rights groups say its fighters have specifically targeted civilians from the ethnic Zaghawa group, raising the stakes of a final, bloody battle for control.

The international community's diplomatic efforts have yielded few results, with the UN Security Council's repeated calls for an end to the siege going unheeded. For the people of El Fasher, trapped in a forgotten war, the world's attention has moved on, leaving them to face the bombs, the starvation, and the agonizing choice between a perilous escape and a slow, agonizing death.