CAIRO: Groups of gunmen who reportedly killed at least 460 people at a hospital in Sudan attacked in several waves, abducting doctors and nurses, then gunning down staff, patients and people sheltering there, the World Health Organization said Friday.
The attack Tuesday in the country’s Darfur region was part of a reported rampage by the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group, as it captured the key city of el-Fasher after besieging it for 18 months.
Witnesses have reported fighters going house-to-house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults.
Many details of the hospital attack and other violence in the city have been slow to emerge, and the total death toll remains unknown.
The fall of el-Fasher heralds a new phase of the brutal, two-year war between the RSF and the military in Africa’s third-largest country.
The war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to UN figures, but aid groups say that is an undercount and the true number could be many times higher. The war has displaced more than 14 million people and fueled outbreaks of diseases believed to have killed thousands. Famine has been declared in parts of Darfur, a region the size of Spain, and other parts of the country.
Escaping El-Fasher
Communications are down in el-Fasher, located deep in a semi-desert region some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Khartoum, the capital. Aid groups that had been operating there have largely been forced out.
Some survivors have staggered into a refugee camp about 40 miles away in the town of Tawila.
More than 62,000 people are believed to have fled el-Fasher between Sunday and Wednesday, the UN migration agency said. But far fewer have made it to Tawila. The Norwegian Refugee Council, which manages the camp, put the number at around 5,000 people, raising fears over the fate of tens of thousands.
Fatima Abdulrahim, 70, fled el-Fasher with her grandchildren a few days before it was captured to escape the siege. She described to The Associated Press a harrowing five-day journey to reach Tawila, hiding in trenches, dodging bullets and gunmen behind walls and empty buildings.
“We ran on the streets, hiding for ten minutes behind the berm, then charging out, running until we made it out,” she said, adding that she kept falling and getting up amid gunfire and shelling. Her companions carried her at times, she said.
“Thirst almost killed us,” she said, describing picking grass to eat from the side of the road.
Along the way, she said she also witnessed militiamen shoot and kill young men trying to bring food into the city.
“The people dead on the streets were countless,” she said. “I kept covering the eyes of the little ones so they don’t see. Some were injured and beaten and could not move. We pulled some to the paved road, hoping a car would come and take them.”
She said some fighters stopped her, and the group she was traveling with, and took all their belongings and beat the children.
At least 450 people have been admitted to the hospital in Tawila, some suffering from severe malnutrition and sexual violence, said Adam Rojal, spokesperson for a local group that works with displaced people in Darfur.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said people were arriving at the camp with broken limbs and other wounds, and some with injuries sustained months ago. Many children arrived at the camp who had lost their parents in the fighting.
Hospital attack
Christian Lindmeier, a WHO spokesman, provided new details about the killings at el-Fasher’s Saudi Hospital, which had been the only hospital in the city still providing limited services during the siege.
Gunmen returned to the facility at least three times, Lindmeier told a UN press briefing in Geneva. At first, the fighters came and abducted a number of doctors and nurses, and at least six are still being held, he said. They later returned and “started killing,” he said.
They came a third time and “finished off what was still standing, including other people sheltering in the hospital,” Lindmeier said, without specifying who the attackers were.
A number of grisly videos from the hospital have circulated online showing bodies and at least one fighter shooting a man. The Associated Press has not been able to independently verify the details of the assault.
The RSF denied committing killings at the hospital. On Thursday, it posted on social media a video filmed at the hospital, showing what it said were some patients at the facility. A person speaking in the video said RSF fighters were caring for the patients, offering them change of wounds and food. At least one wounded man spoke to the reporter.
It was not immediately clear when the video was filmed, although a timestamp stated it was Thursday.
Dr. Teresa Zakaria, WHO’s unit head for humanitarian operations, told the briefing that the hospital was offering “limited service” now. But he said that since el-Fasher’s seizure on Sunday, “there is no longer any humanitarian health presence in the city, and access has remained blocked.”
Militia accused of repeated mass killings
El-Fasher was the Sudanese military’s last stronghold in Darfur, and its fall secures the RSF’s hold over most of the large western region. That raises fears of a new split in Sudan, with the military holding Khartoum and the country’s north and east.
The RSF and its allied militias have been accused of repeated mass killings and rapes when it controlled the capital Khartoum, and as it has seized towns across Darfur and further south over the past two years – mostly targeting civilians of Central and East African ethnicities.
The RSF is largely made up of fighters from the Arab Janjaweed militia, which is accused of carrying out a government-backed genocidal campaign in Darfur in the 2000s in which some 300,000 people were killed.
The Janjaweed were initially recruited by the military to fight Darfur insurgents, who were rebelling against power concentrated in the north. The militia later were reorganized into the RSF as an official force.
The military and the RSF were briefly allied in ruling Sudan following popular protests that ousted longtime leader Omar Al-Bashir. They had a falling out in 2023 in a struggle for power.
Militia attack on hospital in Darfur came in waves: WHO
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Militia attack on hospital in Darfur came in waves: WHO
- Gunmen returned to the facility at least three times, Lindmeier told a UN press briefing in Geneva
- At first, fighters came and abducted a number of doctors and nurses, and at least six still being held, he said
Foreign women linked to Daesh group in Syrian camp hope for amnesty after government offensive
- Many of the women are either wives or widows of Daesh fighters who were defeated in Syria
- “There were changes in the behavior of children and women. They became more hostile,” the camp’s director said
ROJ CAMP, Syria: Foreign women linked to the Daesh group and living in a Syrian camp housing more than 2,000 people near the border with Iraq are hoping that an amnesty may be on the horizon after a government offensive weakened the Kurdish-led force that guards the camp.
The women spoke to The Associated Press on Thursday in northeast Syria’s Roj camp, where hundreds of mostly women and children linked to Daesh have been held for nearly a decade.
The camp remains under control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which until recently controlled much of northeastern Syria. A government offensive this month captured most of the territory the group previously held, including the much larger Al-Hol camp, which is holding nearly 24,000 mostly women and children linked to Daesh.
Many of the women are either wives or widows of Daesh fighters who were defeated in Syria in March 2019, marking the end of what was once a self-declared caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria.
The most well-known resident of the Roj camp, Shamima Begum, was 15 when she and two other girls fled from London in 2015 to marry Daesh fighters in Syria. Begum married a Dutch man fighting for Daesh and had three children, who all died.
Last month, Begum lost her appeal against the British government’s decision to revoke her UK citizenship. Begum refused to speak to AP journalists at the camp.
The director of the Roj camp, Hakmiyeh Ibrahim, said that the government’s offensive on northeast Syria has emboldened the camp residents, who now tell guards that soon they will be free and Kurdish guards will be jailed in the camp instead.
“There were changes in the behavior of children and women. They became more hostile,” the camp’s director said. “It gave them hope that the Daesh group is coming back strongly.”
Since former Syrian President Bashar Assad was toppled in a lightning rebel offensive in December 2024, the country’s new army is made up of a patchwork of former insurgent groups, many of them with Islamist ideologies.
The group led by now-interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa was once linked to Al-Qaeda although Al-Sharaa’s group and Daesh were rivals and fought for years. Since becoming president, Al-Sharaa — formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al-Golani — has joined the global coalition against Daesh.
Camp residents hope for amnesty
One woman from Tunisia who identified herself only as Buthaina, pointed out that Al-Sharaa was removed from the UN and US lists of terrorists.
“People used to say that Al-Golani was the biggest terrorist. What happened to him later? He became the president of Syria. He is not a terrorist any more,” she said. “The international community gave Al-Golani amnesty. I should be given amnesty too.”
She added, “I did not kill anyone or do anything.”
The camp director said more than 2,300 people are housed in the Roj camp. They include a small number of Syrians and Iraqis, but the vast majority of them — 742 families — come from nearly 50 other countries, the bulk of them from states in the former Soviet Union.
That is in contrast to Al-Hol camp, where most residents are Syrians and Iraqis who can be more easily repatriated. Other countries have largely been unwilling to take back their citizens. Human rights groups have for years cited poor living conditions and pervasive violence in the camps.
The US military has begun moving male Daesh detainees from Syrian prisons to detention centers in Iraq, but there is no clear plan for the repatriation of women and children at the Roj Camp.
“What is happening now is exactly what we have been warning about for years. It is the foreseeable result of international inaction,” said Beatrice Eriksson, the cofounder of the children rights organization Repatriate the Children in Sweden. “The continued existence of these camps is not an unfortunate by-product of conflict, it is a political decision.”
Some women don’t want to go home
Some of the women interviewed by the AP said they want to go back home, while others want to stay in Syria.
“I did not come for tourism. Syria is a Muslim country. Germany is all infidels,” said a German woman who identified herself only as Aysha, saying that she plans to stay.
Another woman, a Belgian who identified herself as Cassandra, said she wants to get out of the camp but would like to stay in the Kurdish-controlled area of Syria.
She said that her French husband was an Daesh fighter killed in the northern city of Raqqa, once considered the de facto capital by Daesh. She said Belgium has only repatriated women who had children, unlike her. She was 18 when she came to Syria, she said.
Cassandra added that when fighting broke out between government forces and Kurdish fighters, she started receiving threats from other camp residents because she had good relations with the Kurdish guards.
Future of the camps in limbo
The government push into northeast Syria led to chaos in some of the more than a dozen detention centers where nearly 9,000 members of Daesh have been held for years.
Syrian government forces are now in control of Al-Aqtan prison near Raqqa as well as the Shaddadeh prison near the border with Iraq, where more than 120 detainees managed to flee amid the chaos before most of them were captured again.
Part of an initial ceasefire agreement between Damascus and the SDF included the Kurdish-led group handing over management of the camps and detention centers to the Syrian government.
Buthaina, the Tunisian citizen, said her husband and her son are held in a prison. She said her husband worked in cleaning and did not fight, while her son fought with the extremists.
She has been in Roj for nine years and saw her other children grow up without proper education or a childhood like other children.
“All we want is freedom. Find a solution for us,” Buthaina said.
She said the Tunisian government never checked on them, but now she hopes that “if Al-Golani takes us there will be a solution.”
She said those accused of crimes should stand trial and others should be set free.
“I am not a terrorist. The mistake I made is that I left my country and came here,” she said. “We were punished for nine years that were more like 90 years.”
