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Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim rushed from building to building, desperate to find a place to hide. He ran through streets strewn with corpses. Around him, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur province was engulfed in smoke and fire.
Explosions, shelling and gunfire came from all directions.
After 18 months of fighting, paramilitary militants have captured El Fasher, the Sudanese army’s last remaining stronghold in Darfur. Ibrahim, who fled the city’s last functioning hospital with a colleague, said he feared he wouldn’t live to see the sun set.
“We saw people running around and falling on the ground in front of us,” the 28-year-old doctor told The Associated Press of the three-day attack that began on October 26. “We were moving from house to house and from wall to wall under constant bombardment. Bullets were flying from all directions.”
Three months later, militant brutality rapid support force It’s only now becoming clear. United Nations Officials said thousands of civilians were killed, but there was no exact death toll. They said only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to escape the attack alive and thousands were injured. The fate of the rest remains unknown.
U.N. officials and independent observers said the violence, including mass killings, had turned El Fasher into a “massive crime scene.” When humanitarian teams finally entered in late December, they found the city largely deserted, with few signs of life. one Doctors Without Borders The team visiting this month described it as a “ghost town” largely devoid of anyone who had ever lived there.
Nazat Shameem Khan, Deputy Public Prosecutor international criminal courtIt said that Fasher had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, “which was the result of the siege of the city by the Rapid Support Forces.”
“What is emerging is alarming,” she told the UN Security Council last week, adding that “organized, widespread and large-scale crime” had been used to “maintain control”.
Details of the attack remain sparse as Fasher was cut off from the outside world. Ibrahim provided a rare, detailed first-person account in an interview with The Associated Press in the town of Tavira, about 70 kilometers (43 miles) from the defeated capital.
As the militants swarmed in, Ibrahim said, they shot at civilians who climbed over the wall and hid in trenches trying to escape, while shooting others with vehicles. Seeing so many people being killed, he felt like he was dying.
“It’s a mean feeling,” he said. “How did Fasher fall? Is it over? I saw people running in fear. … It was like Judgment Day.”
The Rapid Support Forces did not respond to calls and emails from The Associated Press asking detailed questions about the brutal attack and Ibrahim’s account. MSF force commander General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo acknowledged abuses by his fighters but questioned the scale of the atrocities.
Prelude to the attack
When the military overthrew Sudan’s civilian-led government in a 2021 coup, it viewed the Rapid Support Forces, descendants of the country’s notorious Janjaweed militia, as allies.
But the army and the militants soon became adversaries. By the end of October, they had been fighting for more than two years in Darfur, which became notorious in the early 2000s for genocide and other atrocities.
The last stronghold of the army was the strategic El Fasher. But Doctors Without Borders, accused by the Biden administration of committing genocide in the ongoing war, has laid siege to the city. As paramilitary forces tightened the noose, residents poured into a small area on the city’s west side.
Ibrahim said civilians were forced to eat animal feed as food ran out. In April, his home was shelled, his mother was injured, and his family fled. But with few medical staff left, Ibrahim stayed on, working at a Saudi maternity hospital as Médecins Sans Frontières closed in.
The Saudi-funded hospital is the last functioning medical center in El Fasher. But months of shelling and drone attacks by Doctors Without Borders drove away most of the staff, leaving only 11 doctors.
“We were working endless shifts and the supply was almost zero,” Ibrahim said.
He was treating patients when the shelling intensified around 5 a.m. on October 26. Civilians who had taken shelter near the hospital began fleeing to nearby military bases.
“people They were running in every direction,” he said. “It was clear the city was falling. “
looking for a way out
At about 7 a.m., he and another doctor decided to escape and walk to a military base about 1.5 kilometers (one mile) away. An hour later, Médecins Sans Frontières militants attacked the hospital, killing a nurse and injuring three others. Two days later, militants attacked the facility again, killing at least 460 people and kidnapping six health workers, according to the World Health Organization.
Ibrahim and his colleagues rushed from house to house, past four corpses and many injured civilians, before reaching the dormitory at El Fasher University. Thirty minutes later, MSF artillery began bombarding the area.
Ibrahim separated from his colleagues and dashed across an open area where “anything could happen to you – a drone attack, a vehicle hitting you, or MSF chasing you,” he said.
He moved between buildings to another dormitory. He hid in an empty water tank and heard the screams of gunmen chasing people during two hours of non-stop shelling.
When the bombing slowed, he headed to the university medical school, jumping from rooftop to rooftop to avoid detection. He found a broken wall behind the school morgue and hid for nearly an hour. It was already midday and Médecins Sans Frontières militants were rampaging over El Fasher.
Ibrahim ran past another 25 to 30 dead people before finally arriving at the military base around 4 p.m., where he was reunited with his colleagues.
Thousands of people, mostly women, children or the elderly, took refuge there. Many people hid in the trenches; dozens were wounded and bleeding. Ibrahim used scraps of clothing to bandage wounds and a sling made from a shirt to immobilize one man’s broken wrist.
way out
At about 8 p.m., Ibrahim and about 200 others, mostly women and children, left the base for Tavira, a town that has grown with the influx of tens of thousands of people fleeing the fighting. Under the bright moon, the tour guide leads the way.
When they heard the sound of trucks or spotted warriors on camels in the distance, they fell to the ground. When the threat passed, they moved on.
Eventually, the group reached the trenches the militants had built to tighten the blockade on the outskirts of Fasher. They helped each other climb over the 3-meter-high (10-foot) trench. But when the group reached the second and third trenches, some struggled and turned back. Their fate remains unknown.
In the last trench, the men in front of Ibrahim were attacked as they climbed out of the trench. Ibrahim and his colleagues lay flat in the trench until the shooting subsided.
Finally, around 1 a.m., they ventured out into the darkness. Five people in the group died and many others were injured.
‘You are doctors. You have money.
The survivors walked for hours to Tavira. Around noon on October 27, they were intercepted by Médecins Sans Frontières fighters on motorcycles and trucks carrying weapons.
Armed men surrounded the group, shot dead two men and captured the doctor and others. The militants separated Ibrahim, his colleagues and three others, tied them to motorcycles and forced them to follow.
In a village controlled by Doctors Without Borders, militants chained prisoners to trees and interrogated them. At first, Ibrahim and his friends told them that they were ordinary civilians.
“I don’t want to tell them I’m a doctor because they exploit doctors,” he said. “But my friend admitted he was a doctor, so I had to do it.”
That evening, the soldiers met with their commander, Brig.-Gen. General Al Fatah Abdullah Idris was identified in a video of the execution of unarmed prisoners.
Ibrahim and his colleagues were led out in chains and taken back to the village, where the militants demanded a ransom for their release.
“They said, ‘You’re doctors. You have money. These organizations give you money, a lot of money,'” he said.
The militants handed them a mobile phone so they could call their families and demand ransom. Initially, the gunmen demanded $20,000 each. Stunned by the number, Ibrahim laughed and the soldiers beat him with rifles.
“My whole family doesn’t have this,” he told them.
After hours of abuse, the militants asked Ibrahim how much he could pay. When he offered $500, they “started hitting me again,” he said. “They said we would be killed.”
The fighters turned to Ibrahim’s friends and repeated the demands and beatings.
Ibrahim said his colleagues eventually agreed to $8,000 each – a huge sum in a country where the average monthly salary is $30 to $50.
“I almost hit him… I didn’t believe they were going to let us go,” Ibrahim said.
In desperation, Ibrahim called his family. After transferring the money, the militants separated the doctors and blindfolded them. Eventually, they were transferred to a vehicle full of militants who told them they would be taken to Tavira.
Instead, they were dumped into areas controlled by Doctors Without Borders, raising fears they would be recaptured. When doctors spotted the militants, they were hiding in the bushes. An hour later they emerged, spotted traces of the carriages, and began following them.
alive but haunted
Three hours later, they discovered the flag of Abdul Wahid of the Sudan Liberation Army, a rebel group not involved in the fighting between Médecins Sans Frontières and government forces.
The rebels allowed them in. They met the Sudanese American Doctors Association team, which provides care to people fleeing El Fasher, and then moved on.
When they finally reached Tawila, Ibrahim was reunited with survivors, including another doctor from a Saudi hospital. The man said he saw a video of the doctors’ arrest on Facebook and was convinced they had been killed.
“He hugged me and we both cried,” Ibrahim said. “He didn’t expect me to be alive. It’s a miracle.”
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Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Adam Geller in New York contributed to this report.