Hasssamier Cherif Ibrahim (centre), a 30-year-old Arabic teacher from Darfur fled with her three children in the middle of the night. — @2023 The New York Times Company
THE gunmen arrived at dawn on motorcycles, horses and in cars. For hours afterward, they fired into houses, rampaged through shops and razed clinics, witnesses said, in a frenzied attack that upended life in El Geneina, a city in the Darfur region of Sudan.
The violence in mid-May, which killed at least 280 people in two days, came just hours after two military factions that have been battling for control of Sudan signed a commitment to protect civilians and allow the flow of humanitarian aid.
Truce agreements have so far failed to end the brutal fighting between the Sudanese army and its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The fighting has decimated many areas of the capital, Khartoum. But the war between the military factions has also swept across the country to the long-suffering western region of Darfur – an area already blighted by two decades of genocidal violence.
The gunmen who poured into El Geneina were backed by the paramilitary forces. They were met with fierce resistance from armed fighters, including some of the city’s residents, who had received weapons from the army, according to doctors, aid workers and analysts.
Amid the fighting, scores of markets were destroyed, dozens of aid camps burned and health facilities were shuttered. As heavy artillery rained from the sky, militants went door-to-door to find targets and shoot at unarmed civilians.
With no food or water amid the scorching heat, thousands began fleeing the city – only to be killed by snipers, leaving bodies piled in the streets.
“The situation is catastrophic in parts of Darfur,” said Toby Harward, the coordinator in Darfur for the United Nations refugee agency who has been receiving the displaced in the neighbouring country of Chad. “Its people are living in a dystopian nightmare where there is no law and order.”
Communications to West Darfur have been cut off. But interviews with two dozen displaced people, humanitarian workers, UN officials and analysts revealed that the region is besieged by levels of violence unlike any in recent years.
More than 370,000 people have fled Darfur in the past seven weeks, according to the International Organisation for Migration. Many of those displaced are reaching border towns like Adre in Chad, hungry and traumatised, relaying harrowing stories about their escape.
They include Hamza Abubakar, a 30-year-old who fled the village of Misteri in West Darfur after it was attacked at dawn in late May by Arab militants backed by the Rapid Support Forces. As people fled their homes, he said, the militants, who wielded AK-47s and other guns, chased them on horses, camels and in cars.
Abubakar had a bullet wound in his left arm and was recuperating at a clinic.
“They had no reason to start killing us,” Abubakar said in a phone interview. Even though his wife and year-old daughter made it out, he said, his brother and sister had died in the street from their injuries.
For years, the government of the former dictator Omar al-Bashir waged a campaign of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing in Darfur that killed as many as 300,000 people since 2003.
The two generals now vying for power in Sudan – Gen Abdel-Fattah Burhan of the army and Lt-Gen Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo of the paramilitary forces – were among those who perpetrated those atrocities, which eventually led to an indictment of al-Bashir at the International Criminal Court.
Tensions had already been rising in Darfur in the weeks before the war started.
The two sides began clashing over control of key installations, including the airport and military bases in cities such as El Fasher in North Darfur and Zalingei in Central Darfur.
In the city of Nyala in South Darfur, clashes ensued and banks were looted after paramilitary members were unable to collect their salaries because Burhan had frozen their accounts and assets, aid workers and analysts said.
Arab militants backed by the paramilitary forces also mobilised and advanced toward El Geneina, where the army was already arming members of ethnic African tribes to defend themselves.
“El Geneina is one of the worst places to be on Earth at this moment,” said Fleur Pialoux, a project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in El Geneina, who evacuated the city in late April.
Before the conflict, her team had been racing to combat a wave of malaria and malnutrition in Darfur ahead of the rainy season.
But as bullets riddled her staff’s compound, Pialoux, 30, knew she had to get her workers out. After four days of huddling in a safe room and scouring social media apps for news of a ceasefire, she learned of a brief truce to allow for bodies to be collected from the streets.
As she and her staff fled the city, Pialoux recalled speeding past scorched displacement camps, a looted market and razed roads.
The warring parties in Darfur, she said, “will stop at nothing until they run out of ammunition or bodies to kill”. — @2023 The New York Times Company
