The “epicenter of human suffering.” This is how Denise Brown, the United Nations aid coordinator for Sudan, describes the situation in Al Fashar to the AFP news agency. On Friday, the UN gained access to the city in war-torn Sudan for the first time in two years.
During the visit, which lasted a few hours, the UN mission staff found an apparently deserted city. “They saw few people on the street,” Brown told Reuters. It took the UN weeks of negotiations to guarantee the safe passage of the employees to the city. The paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has controlled the city since October, is said to have tried to create the image that life in the city is as usual.
But according to Brown, Al Fashar is “a shadow of his former self.” It is estimated that there are still 150,000 inhabitants in the city, where there were once more than 250,000. The city was captured by RSF, which is fighting Sudanese government forces, after an almost two-year siege. The UN mission has seen that many homes in the city have become unusable. There is also only one small market open where food can be bought in small quantities.
War crimes
Earlier in December, researchers from Yale University in the US found that RSF is trying to erase evidence of war crimes in the city. Using satellite images, researchers found one hundred and fifty “clusters of objects consistent with human remains” shortly after the fall of the city. They then saw the suspected remains of mass murders disappear from view, probably due to burning or moving of the human remains.
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From witness statements that human rights organization Amnesty International collected in November shows that during the siege of Al Fashar there were, among other things, executions and rape of residents of the city.
A bloody war has been raging in Sudan since April 2023 between the government army and the paramilitary RSF. The conflict is one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. The war has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of Sudanese have fled. In the Darfur region – where Al Fashar is located – tens of thousands of people from the Masalit, a minority people in Sudan, have been murdered since the start of the war. These attacks are described by several human rights organizations as a genocide.
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