An aid worker who has been witnessed hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the slaughter and starvation sweeping across Sudan has told of the ‘nightmarish’ situation.
‘This is the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis right now and we are at breaking point,’ Mathilde Vu, advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told the Daily Mail.
The NRC is one of the few western NGOs currently operating in Darfur, where two years of civil war have had apocalyptic results.
This week, shocking images emerged from Al-Fasher, where rebels from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were accused of mass atrocities as they attacked the city they had besieged for more than 18 months.
The World Health Organisation said the RSF had killed more than 460 patients and staff inside the Saudi maternity hospital.
‘We are at breaking point,’ Ms Vu told the Mail in a video call.
Al-Fasher was a city of 1million people but has been ringed by the RSF with a sand berm to stop people leaving – and any outside help from entering.
‘Since May of 2024, no humanitarian aid has been able to get through, and no food, and no-one could leave. People are starving and have resorted to eating animal fee,’ said Mathilde.
‘This is the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis right now and we are at breaking point,’ Mathilde Vu (pictured), advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told the Daily Mail
Displaced families from el-Fasher are pictured at a displacement camp where they sought refuge from fighting between government forces and the RSF
A woman is seen piling together sticks in a camp in the town of Tawila in war-torn Sudan’s western Darfur region
‘They have been bombed and shelled on a weekly basis, but then this week the violence escalated and transformed into a very planned, calculated mass campaign of destruction, with a major assault on the city – especially on civilians.
‘Thousands and thousands of people have had to flee, but what is even more horrible is that many don’t make it. Between Al Fasher and Tawila, where our base is, then are 40 miles of desert that people cross on foot, or on donkey for the most part in families or in big groups.
‘Along the way, they face a series of armed checkpoints or mobile gunmen, where they are likely to be detained for looting, rape and execution. It’s a nightmare. We’ve seen videos of people being chased and killed in cold blood.
‘One person we spoke to this week had been in a group of 60, and 20 of them were killed along the way. That’s why in Tawila, we’ve only received around 5,000 people who have made it – the very big worry is what has happened to tens of thousands of people who are fleeing all the time?’
And in even the relative safety of Tawila, the half-million or so displaced people are living in appalling conditions, said Mathilde.
‘We’re just in a complete situation of desperation. Even in June when we had 300,000 people, the place was completely overwhelmed, and that felt like breaking point.
‘The team felt despairing, that we were just delaying death rather than saving lives. Then the rainy season came upon us and there was a major cholera outbreak with no latrines and people defecating in the open. Flies everywhere and very little access to clean water.’
But even against the backdrop of unimaginable daily horror, individual stories still have the power to shock.
The grandmother of one of the displaced, Ikram Abdelhameed, looks on next to her family while sitting at a camp for displaced people who fled from al-Fashir to Tawila
The grandmother of Ikram Abdelhameed looks on while sitting at a camp for displaced people who fled from al-Fashir to Tawila
A grandchild of Ikram Abdelhameed looks on while sitting at a camp for displaced people who fled from al-Fashir to Tawila
Mathilde admitted she found one account, from a boy aged eight or nine, ‘heart-breaking’.
‘He was in Al-Fasher and his parents and siblings were all killed in an artillery strike. He suffered a broken leg from shrapnel, and someone put a splint on the limb.
‘Alone and wounded he remained in the city until hunger and violence forced him to flee and he escaped with others one night, just before the mass slaughter began this week.
‘Somehow he was able to hobble out of the city to its northern gate and continued into the desert. Eventually he was lifted onto some trucks that were transporting people into Tewila, and he arrived on October 23.
‘Since then, he told us he had been wandering from group to group, trying to find a family who would allow him to share their shelter.’
As many as one in ten of the families arriving in Tawila have children with them who are not their own, she said.
‘That’s because their parents were either killed or lost on the way, so they’ve been picked up and protected by a family they don’t know.
‘One woman we talked to had two young children with her who were fleeing, and when they reached Tawila, she had to explain to them that their mother had been killed.’
A medic waits in a makeshift clinic as displaced Sudanese gather after fleeing Al-Fashir city in Darfur, in Tawila
‘Major cities are completely destroyed, and the entire economy is collapsing’, an aid worker said
Mathilde and her colleagues say that western governments have neglected the crisis which has afflicted Sudan and its neighbours.
‘The numbers are so high, it’s impossible to really contemplate,’ she said. ‘Imagine 25million people in dire conditions suffering from core hunger, then 11million people displaced – it’s insane.
‘Major cities are completely destroyed, and the entire economy is collapsing. And it’s not just Sudan, this stretches from the Red Sea across the Sahel.
These are some of the poorest countries in the world and the frustration is seeing the world, and Western governments, particularly, not really addressing this crisis at all.’
Earlier this week, the Mail revealed that the sand around Al Fasher is now stained red with pools of blood so thick they can be seen from space, following the massacre in which at least 2,000 civilians died.
Satellite images also captured piles of bodies, of mainly women and children, who were tragically targeted during the two-day ethnic purge after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Following more than 18 months of brutal siege warfare, the group has now gained control over every state capital in the cast Darfur region.
Allies of the army, the Joint Forces, said on Tuesday that the RSF ‘committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly’.
The northeast African nation was plunged into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions about the future of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the head of the paramilitary rebel group erupted
Fighting exploded in the capital Khartoum but rapidly spread, where it is now estimated that at least 150,000 people have been killed, including many civilians
The civil war has forced more than 14 million people to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine swept parts of the country
The total death toll could not immediately be confirmed, but the shocking satellite images taken after the fall of El Fasher showed evidence of the mass killings.
Body-sized objects were seen in the satellite images clustered around vehicles and nearby an RSF sand berm built around the city. There have been reports of civilians being gunned down as they attempted to break out and flee the bloodshed.
Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects ‘consistent with the size of human bodies’ and ‘reddish ground discolouration’ thought to be either blood or disturbed soil.
The northeast African nation was plunged into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions about the future of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the head of the paramilitary rebel group erupted.
Fighting exploded in the capital Khartoum but rapidly spread, where it is now estimated that at least 150,000 people have been killed, including many civilians.
The civil war has forced more than 14 million people to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine swept parts of the country.