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The army and the militias of the Rapid Support Forces have been fighting each other in Sudan since 2023. The suffering is immeasurable.
“Thanks to high-tech and satellites, we can observe what is currently happening in Al-Fashir almost in real time,” says Nathaniel Raymond, the director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University“We combine, among other things, high-resolution satellite images with geothermal data from NASA,” he explains: “The data shows where houses or vehicles are burning and it gives us clues about where people are being displaced.”
The city of Al-Fashir has been surrounded on three sides for a month. The Rapid Support Forces militias, notorious for their brutality, have now penetrated various districts. “We can see that the large market in the city center has been destroyed. And within two weeks, the Rapid Support Forces have razed settlements to the ground in an area of one and a half square kilometers – through bombing, fire and ground troops.”
Killed or expelled
Not only the population in the city is affected, but also hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people in the surrounding refugee camps, says Nathaniel Raymond. 2.8 million people live in and around the city of Al-Fashir. Thousands are believed to have already died, and everyone else is in acute danger in various ways. People die in a hail of bullets, because of a lack of food, but also through executions. In Al-Fashir, many belong to the Massalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, who have long been deliberately killed or displaced by the Rapid Support Forces.
The US State Department, with which the Humanitarian Research Lab works, speaks of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, the Rapid Support Forces are continuing the genocide in Darfur that they began over 20 years ago – back then under the name Janjaweed militias, Nathaniel Raymond is convinced. But all people, especially those in the refugee camps, are currently at risk because there is no more food in the Al-Fashir region.
Children are starving
The UN was last able to bring food into the city in mid-April. Since then, the Rapid Support Forces have blocked all aid deliveries. The people of Al-Fashir were already starving before the fighting began, says Nathaniel Raymond. And they have reports that the refugees in the Zamzam camp, for example, are now having to survive on peanut shells and grass. There are now many children in the camp who are in the last stage of malnutrition. In this stage, the body breaks down muscle mass and many children die of toxic shock as a result.
In terms of the sheer size of the population and the speed at which damage is being inflicted, Al-Fashir is currently the most dangerous place in the world.
The disaster unfolding in the Al-Fashir region is worse in scale than what is currently unfolding in the Gaza Strip, says epidemiologist Nathaniel Raymond of the Humanitarian Research Lab: “I don’t really like to compare conflicts, because all suffering is bad, anywhere in the world. But in terms of the sheer size of the population and the speed at which this damage is being inflicted, Al-Fashir is currently the most dangerous place in the world.”
But hardly anyone seems to care. No celebrities are standing up for these people, no one is demonstrating or shouting slogans. “We are watching via satellite and the world is silent. It is a shameful silence,” says the scientist.