António Guterres stated that he was “gravely concerned about the recent military escalation” in El-Facher, calling for an “immediate end to the siege and hostilities”
The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, called for an end to the “military escalation” in Sudan, after the massacre of more than 460 people in a maternity hospital in El-Facher, a key city taken by paramilitary forces.
Information about mass rapes has been multiplying since the Rapid Support Forces (RSF, paramilitaries, its acronym in English) took over on Sunday, after 18 months of siege, the last major city that escaped their control in the vast region of Darfur, where “massacres continue”, according to satellite images analyzed by the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at Yale University.
The head of the Sudanese paramilitaries, Mohamed Daglo, acknowledged on Wednesday night that a catastrophe had occurred in the city, justifying: “The war was imposed on us”.
António Guterres stated that he was “gravely concerned about the recent military escalation” in El-Facher, calling for an “immediate end to the siege and hostilities”.
The World Health Organization expressed its “dismay at the news of the tragic murder of more than 460 patients and companions in the Saudi maternity ward in El-Facher”.
According to the institution, the maternity ward was the only hospital still partially operational in the city.
After the takeover of El-Facher by the Sudanese armed forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the RSF now controls the entire Darfur region, a vast region in western Sudan, covering a third of the country.
Satellite communications remain disrupted — except for the RSF, which controls the Starlink network — and access to El-Facher remains blocked, despite calls for the opening of humanitarian corridors.
“More than two thousand civilians were killed during the militia raid in El-Facher, which targeted mosques and Red Cross volunteers,” said Mona Nour Al-Daem, head of humanitarian aid for the pro-SAF government.
In El-Facher, the local resistance committee, which has been documenting violations since the beginning of the conflict, reported on Wednesday night that it had heard gunshots in the western part of the city, “where some remaining soldiers are fighting with (…) tenacity”.
Since Sunday, more than 36,000 people have fled the violence, mainly to the outskirts of El-Facher and to Tawila, a city located 70 kilometers further west and which was already the largest refugee reception area in Sudan, according to the UN, with more than 650,000 displaced people.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned of the “increasing risk of atrocities motivated by ethnic considerations”, recalling the past of Darfur, the scene of vast massacres and rapes committed by the Arab Janjawid militias, from which the RSF comes, against the local Massalit, Four or Zaghawa tribes, in the early 2000s.
The RSF and allied armed groups, which set up a parallel administration in Darfur, now control western Sudan and certain parts of the south.
The SAF controls the north, east and center of Africa’s third largest country, devastated by more than two years of civil war.
Experts fear a new division of Sudan, following South Sudan’s independence in 2011, even though the RSF leader has stated that the complete takeover of Darfur by his forces will promote the country’s “unity”.
“The release of El-Facher is an opportunity for the unity of Sudan and we say: the unity of Sudan through peace or war,” Daglo declared on Wednesday.
Negotiations conducted for several months by the group known as ‘Quad’, which brings together the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, are at an impasse, according to a person close to the negotiations, not identified by AFP.
The truce proposals come up against, according to the same source, “the continued obstruction” of the leader of the SAF, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who rejected in September a proposal that envisaged both his and the RSF’s withdrawal from the post-conflict political transition.
