Organization paints a dark picture of its medical and humanitarian assistance activities
The non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) will “suspend all medical activities” at Bashair hospital in Sudan, in a region of Khartoum controlled by the Rapid Response Forces (RSF), due to repeated attacks in recent months.
“Despite extensive contacts with all parties involved, these attacks have continued over recent months, and MSF has now taken the very difficult decision to suspend all medical activities at the hospital,” the organization announced in a statement released this morning.
In the text, MSF “strongly condemns the ongoing violent attacks on patients and staff at the Bashair university hospital” and states that in the last 20 months the hospital where staff and volunteers work side by side has experienced “repeated incidents of armed people entering in the hospital, threatening medical staff and forcing them to treat their colleagues first, with one case, on November 11, in which the attackers fired their weapons in the medical emergency rooms, killing a patient”.
MSF paints a dark picture of its medical and humanitarian assistance activities, describing “intense and extreme violence every day”, and lamenting the “lacks of food and instruments, which leave people finding it very difficult to survive” in capital of Sudan, where the civil war has been raging for almost two years.
Bashair University Hospital in Khartoum is one of the last remaining operating hospitals in the south of the Sudanese capital offering free healthcare, and since the end of September the hospital has seen a sharp increase in cases of people arriving with serious injuries due to to the escalation of the conflict in this African country.
“Sometimes, people arrive by the dozens at the same time after an attack; on Sunday, January 5th this year, 50 people were brought to the emergency room, with 12 already dead after an attack a kilometer from the hospital”, explains MSF .
The war between the army and the RSF broke out in April 2023 due to strong disagreements over the process of integrating the paramilitary group – now declared a rebel – into the armed forces, a situation that caused the derailment of the transition that began after the overthrow of the regime in Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2019.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the war began on April 15, 2023, while more than 11 million are internally displaced due to violence, making Sudan the scene of the world’s worst internal displacement crisis, according to the UN .
