He told the world what was happening in El Fasher. Then they sought him out. How Sudan lost ‘a true hero of the war’ | Global development

FFor months, militias around El Fasher asked the few people who managed to escape the besieged Sudanese city whether Mohamed Khamis Douda was still inside. They shared videos threatening to kill him, and as they hoped, these videos also reached the activist.

Although the hunger and fear of living under siege and bombardment drove him to despair, Douda remained inside El Fasher and worked constantly to let the outside world know what was happening to the people there. Then on Sunday, October 26, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces overran the city and it was too late. Friends and family confirmed to the Guardian that Douda had been killed.

As the official spokesman for the Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan’s Darfur region, Douda found himself at the center of the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. Injured during the RSF massacre in April, in which hundreds of civilians were killed, he was forced to move to the relative safety of nearby El Fasher.

Since then, Douda had been in regular contact with the Guardian, and for months had been describing daily survival in a place that seemed destined to fall into RSF hands.

Before Sunday’s attack, RSF had cracked down on El Fasher residents by restricting the supply of food, water and medicine and building earthen barriers to control who came in and out.

These are some of the accounts Douda shared with the Guardian:

Monday 4 August

I wake up every morning tired from the previous day’s efforts. Our first struggle is relentless hunger, the second is constant artillery fire.

Even the glow of a cigarette can alert drones flying overhead, so after finishing our meal we have nothing to do but sit quietly and listen to the sound of the drone buzzing and explosions.

This is our daily life, we live in the hope that this nightmare will end one day.

In the months before the fall of El Fasher, Douda said he felt as if he was being followed by drones. Many nights were spent inside a crude bomb shelter made from a metal container buried in the ground. He spent his nights in silence and darkness, afraid of the drones and explosions he could hear around him.

Every day began with a search for food. His aim was always to try to find some millet or sorghum flour, but as food became scarce, he inevitably had to rely on it. ombase – Residue left over from peanut butter production for oil production. It was usually fed to animals, but in El Fasher, people ground it and boiled it. aseeda – A staple food of Sudanese people, usually made from grains such as sorghum or wheat. Finally, Douda said that people ate cowhide because even ombac was exhausted.

He balanced his struggle to survive by trying to support those around him. Along with his friends, he helped distribute food and water and documented rights violations while organizing funerals for the dead. He believed that this was what attracted the ire of the RSF when he shared information about the Colombian mercenaries fighting around El Fasher.

Monday 11 August

I woke up to the sound of explosions in the northern part of the city, near the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people. Then I heard a roar from the southeast. I looked up and saw two drones.

I ran to nearby houses and told them to take shelter. We spent the day in silence, listening to the shelling and machine-gunning for more than six hours, until finally the good news came that the RSF had been expelled. There are 60 martyrs and 100 injured.

I went to visit the wounded with my friend Ahmed; There were countless women and children hit by stray bullets. We helped the teams that supported them and organized the burial procedures.

On the way home, I suggested to my friend that we leave the city. He fell silent and showed me videos on his phone of young men being tortured by El Fasher and the RSF. and the Tawila region after trying to leave El Fasher.

“Then we better stay here until the end,” I said.

Douda’s phone would often go silent for long periods of time, but it would always come back with the latest updates from the city. El Fasher looked set to fall in September when the RSF launched a heavy attack on the Abu Shouk and Daraja Oula districts, including killing dozens of people praying at the mosque.

When he came back online, Douda said people could no longer move and tried to spend their days in makeshift bomb shelters, but the unbearable heat made it difficult to stay there.

Wednesday 24 September

Now I can’t even leave the house to buy food. The people who run public kitchens to feed people cannot leave either. When someone moves, drones attack.

I spend all my time thinking about how I can escape the city, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t figure out how. I heard that RSF is trying to find me because I spoke out against them. When they find people leaving the city, they show them my picture and ask if I’m still here.

RSF is getting closer every day and is preparing to kill everyone in El Fasher. The world needs to act quickly.

Despite Douda’s regular updates on Facebook and directly to the media, nothing has changed.

A day after last Sunday’s attack, news of arrests like Al Jazeera’s began to emerge. Muammer IbrahimAnd Murder of Siham HassanA former member of parliament who helps feed people through Al Fasher’s community kitchens.

Campaign group Avaaz was quick to raise concerns that RSF was tracking activists and searching phones for any signs of contact with the media or human rights groups.

“This is the loss of an entire generation of Sudanese activists and Sudanese youth who not only led the revolution. [of 2019] “This generation is being strategically destroyed by reports of RSF rolls of civil society members,” says Shayna Lewis of Preventing and Ending Mass Atrocities.

Lewis describes Douda as a hero who sacrificed his life to highlight the atrocities in Zamzam and Al Fasher.

“I cannot overstate how great a loss Mohammed’s death is for the civil society community and for Sudan as a country, losing one of the true heroes of the war.”