AFRICA/SUDAN – Serious humanitarian situation in El-Fasher, captured by RSF militias

Khartoum – There is great concern for the approximately 260,000 civilians who have been trapped for 18 months in El-Fasher, a city that fell on October 26 into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces .
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudan Armed Forces , has admitted the withdrawal of his men from the city. “We have agreed to withdraw the army from El-Fasher to a safer place,” he stated in a televised speech. Meanwhile, reports and testimonies of mass killings of civilians continue to arrive. The most ambiguous reports come from images taken by satellites orbiting the area. According to a preliminary analysis conducted by the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, based on satellite imagery, there is evidence of massacres committed by RSF militants.
The report notes that the images show RSF armed vehicles “deployed in tactical formations consistent with house-to-house clearance operations in the Daraja Oula neighborhood, where the presence of civilians seeking refuge in that area was confirmed last week.” The vehicles, equipped with machine guns, appear to have blocked side streets to prevent any possibility of escape. “Analysis of the images shows objects of a size consistent with human bodies on the ground near the RSF vehicles,” the report states, also mentioning “at least five cases of reddish discoloration of the ground,” indicating the possible burial of bodies at the site.
The director of the World Health Organization , Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has reported that during the fighting, the only hospital still partially functioning in the city, the Saudi Maternity Hospital, was hit, killing a nurse and wounding three other medical staff members. From a strategic perspective, the conquest of El-Fasher, the last stronghold in Darfur held by the SAF and located at a crossroads of important transport and supply routes, opens the RSF access to all of western Sudan. It also allows the militants to advance towards neighboring Kordofan. In recent hours, intense fighting has been reported between the SAF and the RSF in Jebel Hashaba, southwest of El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan.

Read original article