‘No mercy’: Sudan soldier tells of escape from RSF slaughter in el-Fasher

Abubakr Ahmed was ready to die on the soil he had fought so hard to defend from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

For 550 days, he fought as a member of the “popular resistance”, a neighbourhood group formed to help the army and aligned armed groups protect el-Fasher from the RSF, their rival in the two-and-a-half-year civil war.

The besieged city was the last army stronghold in the sprawling region of Darfur, until it fell on October 26.

According to Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army surrendered and negotiated the safe exit of its troops in the hope of stopping a bloodbath.

But their withdrawal left 250,000 people – starving and beleaguered civilians – to face the RSF alone.

Ahmed remembers “shooting” his way out of the city with a handful of young men from his unit. During the final clashes, shrapnel hit Ahmed in the abdomen after a rocket-propelled grenade blew up a car nearby.

He managed to escape, unlike so many others.

“The RSF killed civilians and left their corpses in the streets,” Ahmed, 29, told media after he had escaped el-Fasher.

“They were killed without mercy.”

Mass exodus

In the first three days after capturing el-Fasher, the RSF killed at least 1,500 people, according to the local monitor Sudan’s Doctors’ Network. The figure includes the killings of 460 patients and their companions from the local al-Saud hospital, which has also been verified by the World Health Organization.

media’s own verification unit, Sanad, authenticated several videos that showed RSF troops standing over a pile of dead bodies or executing a row of unarmed young men.

The mass killing has prompted more than 33,000 people to flee already, with many arriving in nearby towns and villages such as Tawila and Tine, about 60km (37 miles) away.

However, most civilians remain trapped in el-Fasher, hiding from RSF gunmen.

Others are still making the long and exhausting trek through the open desert to reach safety, likely separated from friends and loved ones and without anything to eat or drink.

One survivor, Mohammed, said that he reached Tawila on October 28 and that he expects tens of thousands of new arrivals to show up soon.

Like most inhabitants from el-Fasher, Mohammed is from one of the sedentary “non-Arab” tribes that has historically been persecuted by the nomadic “Arab” tribes that make up the majority of the RSF.

“The majority of people won’t stay in el-Fasher because they are terrified of the RSF. “They don’t trust the RSF because they know they will be persecuted by them,” Mohammed told media.

“The Arabs will live in one place and the non-Arabs in another. That’s just the way it is now, unfortunately,” he added.

Echoes of Rwanda

RSF’s leader, Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, said in a speech on Wednesday that he promises to investigate reports of “abuses” taking place.

But survivors say the killing in el-Fasher appears to be a systematic attempt to ethnically cleanse the non-Arab population.

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which provides satellite analysis of the fighting in Darfur, said in a report on October 28 that there was clear evidence that the RSF was killing people en masse as they tried to flee.

“The scale of these mass killings cannot currently be communicated in satellite imagery alone and it is highly likely that any estimates of the total number of people who RSF has killed are undercounted,” the HRL report said.

Sheldon Yett, the Sudan representative for the United Nations Children’s Foundation (UNICEF), described the scenes in el-Fasher as “killing fields”.

“I was in Rwanda during the genocide, and there are echoes of this here. The kind of slaughter we are seeing and the sense of pride that [the perpetrators] have in killing innocent people [in el-Fasher] is what scares me,” Yett told media.

In addition, he said that UNICEF has lost contact with many of the local relief volunteers and initiatives that they were supporting on the ground, including the staff running community kitchens, which play a pivotal role in mitigating hunger across Sudan.

He said that many of them are in acute danger.

The RSF has a track record of targeting local relief workers across Sudan, often accusing them of “collaborating” with the army.

“The situation of many of our national partners [in el-Fasher] remains very precarious, and we have had trouble getting in touch with many of the people we rely on to provide services to people,” Lytt said.

“That doesn’t mean they are dead. But many are on the move and hiding, and they’re afraid,” he added.

Hollow condemnation

News and videos of atrocities in el-Fasher prompted statements of condemnation from the UN, United States and European Union.

They all called on the RSF to “protect civilians” and abide by international law.

But survivors and analysts say that the global community should have used their diplomatic leverage to try and prevent atrocities from ever taking place.

“The RSF tried to take over el-Fasher for so many months – and from the very first day –  we knew what was going to happen to el-Fasher if they succeeded,” said Hamid Khalafallah, an expert on Sudan and a PhD candidate at Manchester University.

“This is a case of refusal and betrayal by the international community, especially from multilateral organisations like the UN and Western powers … They didn’t try to do anything serious in regards to protecting civilians,” he told media.

Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a senior researcher in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch, noted that the RSF has a pattern of committing mass atrocities after seizing or invading new territory, as it did in el-Geniena and Aradamata in West Darfur.

He stressed that diplomats failed to end the pattern of impunity by refusing to sanction RSF leader Hemedti, possibly out of a belief that it would impede ceasefire talks.

This enduring impunity has made the RSF comfortable enough to film their own crimes in el-Fasher, said Gallopin.

“Diplomats are focused on getting to an elusive ceasefire and in that process they put aside any measures – to protect civilians, or sanction perpetrators – that they think could get in the way of a ceasefire,” he told media.

“But then, nobody is held to account for attacks on civilians and the international community, in essence, washes its hands of the atrocities that occur.”