Sudan’s Paramilitary Killed Hundreds Including Hospital Patients In Darfur, Residents Say

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organization, said in his statement that 460 patients and their attendants were reported to have been killed in the Saudi Maternity Hospital in Al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state. He said the WHO was “appalled and deeply shocked” by the reports.
The Sudanese Doctors Network, a medical group monitoring the war, said on Tuesday that Rapid Support Force fighters “killed in cold blood everyone they found at the Saudi Hospital, including patients, attendants and anyone in the wards.”

Sudanese and aid workers have revealed harrowing details of atrocities carried out by the RSF, which has been fighting to take over Africa’s third largest country since 2023, after seizing the army’s last stronghold in Darfur after more than 500 days of siege.

“Janjaweed showed no mercy to anyone,” Umm Amena, a mother of four who fled the city two days later on Monday, told RSF, using the Sudanese term for RSF.

RSF commander General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo on Wednesday acknowledged what he called “abuses” by his forces. In his first comment on the Telegram messaging app since El-Fasher’s downfall, he said an investigation had been opened. He did not explain in detail.

RSF has been accused by the UN and human rights groups of atrocities throughout the war, including a 2023 attack on Geneina, another Darfur town, in which hundreds of people were killed.

Amena was among three dozen people, mostly women and children, who were detained for a day by RSF fighters in an abandoned house near the Saudi Hospital in al-Fasher.

The Associated Press spoke with Amena and four others who managed to escape al-Fasher and arrived early Tuesday, exhausted and dehydrated, in the nearby town of Tawila, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of al-Fasher, which is already home to more than 650,000 displaced people.

The U.N. Migration Agency said about 35,000 people had fled al-Fasher since Sunday, mostly to surrounding rural areas.

Jacqueline Wilma Parlevliet, an official with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the new arrivals told stories of widespread ethnic and politically motivated killings, including reports of disabled people being shot to death because they could not escape and others being shot as they tried to escape.

Eyewitnesses told the AP that RSF fighters went from house to house on foot, riding camels or in vehicles, beating and shooting at people, including women and children. Eyewitnesses said many people died in the streets from gunshot wounds, while others died trying to escape to safety.

“This place was like a killing field,” Tajal-Rahman, a man in his late 50s, said over the phone from the outskirts of Tawila. “There are dead bodies everywhere, people are bleeding and there is no one to help them.”

Both Amena and Tajal-Rahman said RSF fighters tortured and beat detainees on Monday and shot at least four people who later died of wounds. They also said that they sexually assaulted women and girls.

Giulia Chiopris, a pediatrician at a hospital run by the Médecins Sans Frontières medical group in Tawila, said they have received many patients with injuries from bombings or gunshot wounds since October 18.

He said the hospital also received a large number of malnourished children, many of them unaccompanied or orphans, who had become severely dehydrated during the journey from al-Fasher.

“They come here really exhausted,” he told the AP. “We are seeing a lot of trauma cases and a lot of orphans related to the last bombing.”

On Monday night, he recalled, he picked up his three siblings, the youngest 40 days old and the oldest 4 years old, whose parents were killed in the city. He said they were brought to the hospital by strangers.

In a report released late Tuesday, the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Laboratory (HRL) said RSF fighters have continued to commit mass killings since capturing al-Fasher.

The report, based on satellite imagery from Airbus, said it confirmed RSF’s allegations of executions and mass killings around the Saudi Hospital and at a detention center at the former Children’s Hospital in the eastern part of the city.

It was also stated that there were “systematic murders” around the eastern wall that RSF built outside the city earlier this year.

HRL also stated that RSF had targeted attacks on health facilities, healthcare workers, patients and humanitarian workers, which constituted a war crime.

“It’s incomprehensible horror,” said Simon Mane, national director of aid group World Vision. “Children don’t just die; their existence is cruelly taken away, their hopes and futures are cruelly destroyed. Their fate is a devastating moral failure.”

He warned of disaster as reports of escalating atrocities “now reflect the darkest chapters of this protracted crisis.”

Aid groups said hundreds of people had been killed and hundreds detained since the RSF overran the city, but said the death toll was difficult to determine due to a near communications blackout.

HRL said satellite images cannot show the true extent of mass killings and that “estimates of the total number of people killed by RSF are likely an undercount.”

Before the latest violence, approximately 1,850 civilians were killed in North Darfur between January 1 and October 20 this year, including 1,350 in Al-Fasher, according to UN spokesman Farhan Aziz Haq.

Footage of the attack caused a wave of outrage around the world. France, Germany, Britain and the European Union condemned the persecution.

Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the footage from al-Fasher “reveals a terrible truth: Rapid Support Forces are free to commit mass atrocities with little fear of consequences.”

“The world needs to take action to protect civilians from more heinous crimes,” he said.

Sen. Jim Risch, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned RSF attacks on the city on Tuesday and called for its designation as a foreign terrorist organization.

“RSF practiced terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, including genocide, against the Sudanese people,” he wrote to X.