After Fleeing a Massacre, Survivors Encountered Still More Gunfire and Abductions

In days-long journeys by foot and with donkeys, they fled the besieged city on roads littered with bodies. Many had lost relatives to gunfire and abductions along their trek.

Tens of thousands of people have tried to escape the Sudanese city of El Fasher since paramilitary fighters seized the city in Darfur from Sudan’s military more than a week ago. But just a trickle have made it to the nearest aid zone after surviving a massacre inside the city and trying to flee the violence.

“There were bodies of men and women everywhere — some people were run over by vehicles,” said Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman who reached Tawila, the aid area 40 miles from El Fasher. “While we were on the road, they took girls from our group — choosing them and dragging them away.”

The accounts of those who have escaped El Fasher in recent days, and which were recorded by the Norweigan Refugee Council on Saturday, portray a sweeping campaign of destruction that echoes the genocidal violence that defined Darfur more than two decades ago. The city was the last city in the region that had not yet capitulated to the Rapid Support Forces, who have been battling Sudan’s military in a ruinous civil war for more than two years.

Now, hundreds are arriving to Tawila with bullet wounds and many bear the signs of torture, according to local medics. Children — presumably orphaned along the way — are often being deposited not by their parents, but by other escaping strangers. And there is grave concern for the thousands unaccounted for.

“Our question is very simple: Where are they? Where are the rest? It’s extremely concerning and disturbing,” Sylvain Penicaud, head of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Tawila, said by phone. ”Our fear is that these people have been detained for extortion or got killed.”

Much of the world, including the U.N., is still in the dark about the precise scale of carnage that has been unfolding inside and around El Fasher, where communication has been largely cut off and most people who remain there are unreachable. The survivors’ accounts in this article were collected by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s aid team in Tawila on behalf of The New York Times.

Their testimonies were shared on condition that their full names not be used to avoid acts of reprisal. The interviewed survivors are in areas where there is no telephone or internet access and where they could not be directly reached by journalists. The Times shared questions with aid workers in Tawila who went to encampments and recorded answers.

Their stories mirror the accounts emerging from some other survivors, reached by journalists in Tawila or speaking to the few who have satellite phones, who described scenes of horror.

“The treatment was brutal — there were beatings, executions. Some people were taken away just because they were black,” said Nasreldin, who managed to make it on a truck to Tawila with his child after telling a group of women about his wife’s death. “We also left behind a family of about eight people, all of them wounded.”

“Anyone who leaves El Fasher is considered an enemy to them,” he said.

Aid groups warn that thousands are still trapped inside El Fasher, where witnesses described widespread executions and routine shellings. In one of the most alarming accounts, the World Health Organization verified an attack on the city’s last-functioning hospital in which more than 450 people had been killed.And on Monday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading international authority on hunger crises declared a famine in city

“When they entered the hospital, they executed some people, others managed to hide and the attackers didn’t find them,” said Saeeda, who was sheltering at the hospital after her house had been shelled. When she left, she said, “there were bodies everywhere,” and “shelling, fighting and many dead people, either from explosions or gunfire.”

“We spent two days wandering inside the city,” said Fatima, a 48-year-old woman, recounting the start of the attack. “Whenever the shelling intensified we would hide inside a building. When that building was shelled, we’d run out and take shelter in another one. There were people we had to leave behind dead.”

Though the war is powered by new weapons, blood is spilling on an old battlefield. The Rapid Support Forces descend from the Janjaweed, predominantly Arab militias accused of committing genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. The same ethnic divisions appear to be fueling atrocities today.

“As long as you’re black, they assume you’re a soldier, or belong to the former regime,” Nasreldin said.

Escaping El Fasher involves an arduous journey stalked by gunmen and riddled with “extortion, arbitrary arrests, detention, looting, sexual violence, and harassment” according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Many face worsening hunger along the way, surviving on animal feed.

The latest abuses have drawn condemnations from Western capitals and international organizations, but few officials have been willing to openly criticize the United Arab Emirates for its role in backing the R.S.F. The Emirates is a key strategic ally of Washington and other Western countries.

In Washington, some congressional leaders have renewed calls for a pause on arms sales to the Emirates until it stops arming the paramilitary in Sudan.

Sudan’s long-running civil war is widely considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The fighting has forced 12 million people from their homes and left as many as 400,000 people dead by some estimates.

Among the most gruesome outcomes is the number of children the war has left abandoned.

One was a young boy who arrived last week in Tawila. He said his parents and siblings were killed a in a strike as they tried to flee El Fasher. On a broken foot, he wandered alone to the northern gates of the city until others who were fleeing put him on a truck to Tawila.

“Now I’m here alone,” he said. “At night I find places where people gather and sleep on the ground near them.”

“I hope someone helps me.”