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The news he feared so much arrived a few minutes before midnight.
For weeks, Bahaadin Adam had heard nothing from his family members caught up in the fighting that convulsed Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state and Sudan’s second-largest city. Adam, who had fled weeks earlier to neighboring South Sudan, remained nervous and constantly checked his phone for updates.
Finally, as he was getting ready to go to sleep, he received a message from his brother. Most of the family managed to escape from Nyala, but her two younger sisters, Meethaaq, 24, and Hana, 10, were killed by artillery fire.
“They tore me into pieces,” Adam said in a recent interview in the town of Renk, South Sudan.
Five months after a devastating war began in Sudan between rival military forces, the western Darfur region has quickly become one of the worst affected in the country. The people of Darfur have already suffered genocidal violence in the last two decades that has left up to 300,000 dead.
Now Darfur, which had been moving toward relative stability, is being torn apart by a national war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces and their allies, predominantly Arab militias, have assumed control of large areas of Darfur, while the regular army operates mainly from garrisons in major cities, residents and observers said.
As the two sides battle for supremacy, civilians have increasingly been caught in the crossfire, especially in recent weeks. More than 40 people were killed late last month while taking shelter under a bridge in Nyala, and at least 40 were killed in airstrikes on the city this month, activists and medical workers said. The discovery of mass graves, including more than a dozen last week by the United Nationshas raised fears of a resurgence of ethnically motivated attacks in Darfur and pressured the International Criminal Court to launch a new investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region.
Frantic and sometimes conflicting diplomatic efforts to end the conflict – by the United Nations, African countries, Saudi Arabia and the United States – have gone nowhere.
Last week, the UN special envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, resigned months after Sudanese officials declared him unwelcome in the country. In his farewell address to the UN Security Council, Mr. Perthes warned that the conflict “could be turning into a full-scale civil war.” Army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan will address the UN General Assembly this week in New York.
Amid the hail of mortar shells, displacement levels are skyrocketing, food prices are soaring and millions of people are now on the brink of famine. More than 1.5 million people have been internally displaced in Darfur since mid-April, according to the UN refugee agency, the highest of any region in Sudan. Hundreds of thousands more civilians from the region have arrived at transit centers and refugee camps in neighboring countries.
Eight lawyers and at least 10 human rights defenders have been killed and their offices ransacked in Darfur in recent weeks, raising fears that they were being targeted for documenting human rights violations or providing legal support to victims, according to Elsadig. Ali Hassan, acting president of the board of directors of the Darfur Bar Association.
In interviews, South Darfur residents who managed to reach safety in South Sudan described a rapid increase in theft and looting by armed militias allied with paramilitary forces. With food and water supplies dwindling, many packed up their meager belongings and left, hungry and weak, for the border.
As the number of injuries increased, medical workers, exhausted, hungry and lacking critical supplies, watched as their patients died or their wounds rotted from lack of treatment. Families, fearful of the fire, quickly buried their loved ones in shallow or unmarked graves.
“Another generation from Darfur is learning to live with war and atrocities,” said Maha Mohamed, a Sudanese refugee from Nyala who was at the Renk transit center. “It’s a tragedy”.
Continued hostilities in Darfur risk plunging the country into a protracted war, observers say, with the potential to spread to neighboring countries. In recent weeks, army chief General al-Burhan has traveled abroad and met with leaders of nations including Egypt, Qatar, Turkey and South Sudan in an effort to strengthen his legitimacy and rule out the Rapid Security Forces. like a rebel group. .
The paramilitary chief, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, has counterattackedaccusing General al-Burhan of trying to “pose himself as the head of state” and planning to establish a “war government” in the coastal city of Port Sudan.
His comments came as violence escalated in the blockaded Sudanese capital, Khartoum, where an airstrike last week killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 60, doctors and aid workers said.
“Everything is just unbearable,” Mamadou Dian Balde, regional director of the U.N. refugee agency, who recently traveled through parts of Sudan, said in an interview.
Some of those fleeing conflict in Southern and Eastern Darfur states are being relocated to several relief camps in South Sudan, a nation burdened by its own political, economic and social challenges.
One of those camps, the Wedwil refugee settlement in the city of Aweil, is home to nearly 9,000 Sudanese. Every night, families gather in groups, share sweet tea and coffee, pray together, and listen to Sudanese music. Many of them were successful professionals and businessmen, all now united by a devastating war that has destroyed everything they worked so hard to build.
“The fire of war has engulfed everything in Darfur,” said Ahmed Abubakar, a 35-year-old teacher who fled Nyala, South Darfur.
Abubakar said members of the paramilitary forces raided his house, accused him of being an army officer and threatened to shoot him in front of his wife and three children. But he begged them not to, he said, telling them about his job teaching geography and history and his wife’s job as a kindergarten teacher. After more than an hour, the gunmen agreed to let them go, he said, but not before taking almost everything of value from the house.
Memories of that day and the family’s harrowing journey to safety continue to haunt the children, he said. His 3-year-old daughter Minan clings to him wherever he goes. His five-year-old son, Mustafa, constantly asks him when he can go back to school.
“I had ambitions for myself and my children,” Abubakar said. “But I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.”
Mr. Adam, who lost both of his sisters, shared the same feelings of loss and hopelessness.
Before war broke out on April 15, he hoped to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan, celebrate his sister’s graduation from university and, days later, attend her engagement party. But his sister was gone and the entire family was scattered between two countries with limited communications.
“We were once a happy family,” he said one recent afternoon. “But this war has made everything difficult and everyone sad.”