At least 460 patients and their companions have been killed in an attack on a maternity hospital in Al Fasher, a city in North Darfur (Sudan) taken by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since last weekend, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported this Wednesday.
The death toll was provided by the director general of the UN health agency, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The organization he leads is “horrified and deeply shocked” by the massacre, which comes after other attacks and arrests of health workers.
In the two and a half years of conflict between the Army and the RSF, the WHO has verified at least 185 offensives against the Sudanese health network, with 1,204 dead and 416 injured, including patients and health workers. Tedros has called for an “immediate and unconditional end to the attacks” and for “all patients, health workers and health facilities” to be “protected by international humanitarian law.”
The Sudanese rebels of the RSF are mass executing thousands of civilians in , which fell into their hands last Sunday after 500 days of siege. This is confirmed by a multitude of reports and testimonies, and shown by satellite images from Yale University and videos circulating on social networks, in which militiamen can be seen shooting at unarmed civilians who are fleeing, as well as people hanging from trees, run over or executed in full detention. The UN assures that there are indications of ethnic motivations in these crimes and highlights and girls.
This Tuesday, researchers from Yale University released satellite images of the city of El Fasher. In them you can see groups of supposed corpses piled up and large areas where the ground is dyed red, equivalent to large blood stains. Civilians who in the last few hours have managed to reach the city, located about 60 kilometers away, arrive traumatized after having witnessed massacres during their escape from the city, according to the United Nations. He claims to have reports of “atrocious executions,” as well as numerous cases of rape and sexual abuse against women and girls.
“Everything indicates that El Fasher suffers a systematic and intentional targeting of the indigenous non-Arab Fur, Zaghawa and Berti communities through forced displacement and summary executions,” the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory states in its report. The Sudanese RSF, of Arab majority and heirs of the Janjawid, which between 2003 and 2005 carried out the genocide in Darfur, have been accused of carrying out ethnic massacres of non-Arab populations in this region during the current Sudanese civil war. This was determined, for example, by the US Government, which last September.
The Sudanese army confirmed this Tuesday the fall of El Fasher into the hands of the paramilitaries, who on Sunday had already managed to take control of the headquarters after a rapid offensive. The city, capital of North Darfur, has been under an intense siege for more than a year and a half by the rebels, who have blocked access to it using hunger as a weapon of war. The Sudanese Government claims that at least 2,000 people died in this siege that caused more than 200,000, half of them children, to be trapped in the city, according to the United Nations. Of them, 26,000 have managed to escape in recent days while the final assault by the RSF was taking place.
The city of El Fasher was the last one in Darfur that resisted the rebels and its capture is an important strategic victory for the paramilitaries. For the first time in April 2023, the RSF, with the help of mercenaries and the United Arab Emirates, whose Government denies it, takes control of the entire territory of Darfur, its main fiefdom. The main front of the war now moves to Kordofan, where the UN has observed patterns of violence similar to those in Darfur. The recent fall of the city of Bara, in North Kordofan, into the hands of the paramilitaries shows their intention to advance towards Khartoum, the country’s capital and main army headquarters.
The Sudanese conflict, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today, has left tens of thousands of dead [el enviado especial de EE UU en Sudán, Tom Perriello, apunta que unos 150.000]some 12 million displaced from their homes and 30 million people in need of urgent humanitarian aid. The RSF rebels, under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, confront the Sudanese army of General Abdel Fattá al Burhan. Both contributed to the fall of dictator Omar al Bashir in 2019, but ended up clashing for power, unleashing .
