At least 36,000 Sudanese have fled since fall of El Fasher to RSF, says UN agency | Sudan
More than 36,000 people have fled Sudan’s Kordofan region due to an increase in fighting since Saturday, the UN Migration Agency said, after the city of El Fasher in neighboring Darfur was captured by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last week after more than a year of siege.
The strategic central region between the country’s Darfur states and the Khartoum-River region, which includes the capital Khartoum to the east, has become the latest battleground in the two-year civil war between the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) and the paramilitary group in recent weeks.
The International Organization for Migration said on Sunday that an estimated 36,825 people fled five districts in North Kordofan province between October 26 and October 31, the day El Fasher fell into RSF.
Most people set out on foot towards the town of Tawila, west of El Fasher. It hosts more than 652,000 displaced peopleThe UN said.
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric said in a comment published on Monday that the situation in Sudan was “horrible” and history was repeating itself in Darfur.
More than 200,000 people were killed in the Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, when Arab Janjaweed militias were selected by Omar al-Bashir’s regime to suppress the rebellion of non-Arab ethnic groups. Janjaweed evolved into RSF. “History is repeating itself and the situation gets worse when one place is taken over by the other side,” he told Reuters.
On Monday, prosecutors at the international criminal court (ICC) said: Gathering evidence regarding allegations of mass murderRape and other crimes in El Fasher. Witnesses reported that RSF fighters went from house to house, killing and sexually assaulting civilians. According to the World Health Organization, gunmen killed at least 460 people in a hospital and kidnapped doctors and nurses.
“As part of the ongoing investigation, our office is taking immediate steps to address the alleged crimes related to the incident. [El Fashir] “to preserve and collect relevant evidence for use in future investigations,” prosecutors said in a statement.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading international authority on hunger crises, said on Monday that famine had been detected in El Fasher and Kadugli in South Kordofan. It was stated that 20 other regions in Darfur and Kordofan were also at risk of famine.
People in North Kordofan reported an increase in RSF and army presence in towns and villages in the province on Monday.
Both forces are vying for El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan province and a key logistics and command center that connects Darfur to Khartoum and is also home to an airport.
“Today all our forces are united on the Bara front here,” an RSF member said in a video shared late Sunday, referring to a city north of El Obeid. RSF took control of Bara last week.
Suleiman Babiker, who lives in Um Smeima, west of El Obeid, told Agence France-Presse that the number of RSF vehicles has increased since the group captured El Fasher. “We stopped going to our farms because we were afraid of conflicts,” he said.
Another resident, who wished to remain anonymous for security reasons, said there had been “a huge increase in army vehicles and weapons to the west and south of Al Obeid” in the past two weeks.
Martha Pobee, the UN under-secretary-general for Africa, last week raised the alarm over “large-scale atrocities” and “ethnically motivated reprisals” by the RSF in Bara.
He warned that the fall of El Fasher echoed examples in Darfur, where RSF fighters were accused of mass murders, sexual violence and kidnappings against non-Arab ethnic groups.
The conflicts in Sudan have created what the UN describes as: one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. more than 150,000 people They were killed and more than 14 million They were removed from their homes.
In his weekly Angelus address in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Pope Leo called for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors in Sudan, saying attacks on civilians and blocking of humanitarian aid “cause unacceptable suffering.”
Spoljaric said tens of thousands of people fled El Fashir after the RSF took over the city, and tens of thousands more were trapped there without access to food, water or medical aid.
He said ICRC staff in Tawila had heard reports that people fleeing “sometimes fainted or even died from exhaustion or from their wounds” and described the situation as “absolutely beyond what we would consider acceptable.”
The ICRC chief said the world was experiencing a “decade of war”, with the number of armed conflicts doubling in the last 15 years to about 130, and called on the parties to the conflict, from the Gaza Strip to Ukraine, to abide by the rules of war.
Sudan’s Ambassador to Egypt Imadeldin Mustafa Adawi accused RSF of committing war crimes in El Fasher. He said the Sudanese government would not negotiate with the paramilitary group and called on the international community to designate the group as a terrorist organization.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday called on the Muslim world to end the violence in Sudan. “No one with a heart … can accept the recent massacres targeting civilians in El-Fasher. We cannot remain silent,” he told delegates at a gathering of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report
