I Interviewed a Doctor in Sudan. Days Later, He Was Killed.

Dr. Omar Selik wanted to be seen, literally.

At the end of a harrowing, hourlong interview about life in the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher, where he spoke via a rare satellite internet connection, he asked to switch on his camera. An exhausted, war-weary face appeared, then broke into an enormous grin.

“This is a good day for me,” Dr. Selik said, relief washing across his features. “I feel like a human being again.”

I found myself smiling too.

That simple moment of connection was enough to provide him with fleeting relief after 500 days of horrific siege. Dr. Selik, 43, was one of the last health workers in El Fasher, a city of a quarter-million desperate residents in the western region of Darfur, where death fell from the sky and starvation was a constant companion.

Moments earlier, Dr. Selik had been crying as he described how a pregnant woman had bled to death in his care for want of simple medicines. Now he tilted his camera down, inviting me to look at his lunch. I could hardly believe my eyes.

That was why it felt so good to speak with someone on the outside, he said: “People are dying, and nobody is even watching.”

For me, it was also a moment of clarity. Since Sudan’s civil war started in April 2023, I had been unable to enter Darfur, ground zero of a nationwide famine and the site of a crushing siege. Now, through the fog of war, I had found someone whose raw, urgent testimony crystallized the depravity of the conflict.

And then he was gone.

Days later, Dr. Selik left his home to attend dawn prayers at a nearby mosque. A missile slammed through the roof, exploding among the worshipers and killing about 75 people. Dr. Selik was among them.

It was the latest example of the toxic mix of technology, brutality and impunity that have come to characterize a war that has killed as many as 400,000 people, by some expert estimates. Witnesses said the missile was fired by a drone, one of many supplied by the United Arab Emirates to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group laying siege to El Fasher. The Emirates denies backing either side in the war.

For the city’s embattled residents, it was another devastating loss. “My heart is broken,” said Salwa Ahmed, a university lecturer who had taken shelter in Dr. Selik’s house.

Like other residents, Ms. Ahmed said she felt abandoned by the outside world, and was skeptical that help would ever come. One faint glimmer of help, though, is on the horizon, led by President Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos.

For weeks, Mr. Boulos has been negotiating with the R.S.F. to allow international aid into El Fasher, and last week he told the Financial Times an aid convoy could arrive “very, very soon.”

A senior U.S. official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the convoy would likely comprise about 45 U.N. trucks, and could set out as soon as next Monday. But the details are still being worked out, including, crucially, how any aid would be distributed once it reached the stricken city.

The U.S. official said it was unclear if the R.S.F. would allow the aid to reach neighborhoods held by its enemy, the Sudanese military — the same areas that have borne the brunt of the siege.

A State Department declined to comment on the talks, and referred to Mr. Boulos’s earlier statements about his efforts in Sudan.

The siege began in April 2024 as the R.S.F., whose fighters mostly come from Darfur, tried to drive Sudan’s military out of the sprawling region. It intensified in March after the R.S.F. was expelled from Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

As others fled, Dr. Selik stayed. “He said, ‘I can’t leave these people behind,’” said Omer Eltahir, a fellow doctor living in Ireland, who spoke to him in July.

Dr. Selik took up at the city’s last functioning hospital, which had been bombed 30 times, where he quickly retrained as a combat medic. “Head trauma, chest trauma, punctured abdomens,” he told me, rattling off a list of typical injuries he treated. “Anything caused by a bullet or a bomb.”

This summer, the crisis intensified after R.S.F. fighters built a high earthen wall around El Fasher that is now 42 miles long. Fighters shot dead anyone who tried to cross it at night.

At the hospital, supplies of food and medicine ran out. Surgeons used mosquito nets as medical gauze to carry out operations. Cholera and malaria swept through wards.

One day, at a small clinic he ran in the north of the city, Dr. Selik encountered a group of Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the R.S.F. “They were speaking Spanish,” he said. Later, the bodies of Colombians killed in battle were brought to the hospital, he said.

Dr. Selik sent his wife and children to Khartoum, for their safety. But his sister stayed behind, only to be killed with her three children in August, when a shell crashed into their home. “That’s just one story,” he told me. “In this city, there are so many like it.”

A Starlink terminal, provided by a relative, offered a lifeline to the outside world. Yet even there, the conflict found him. On WhatsApp groups of Sudanese medics, Dr. Selik was dismayed by bitter disputes that erupted along political or ethnic lines, Dr. Eltahir said.

“People were calling each other pigs,” he said. “Omar asked them to stop.”

But the Starlink terminal also provided him a means of calling for help. What worried him most, Dr. Selik told me, was what would happen if the R.S.F. completely overran the city. “They will kill everyone,” he said.

Aid workers and American officials have similar concerns. The city could fall to the R.S.F. within weeks or even sooner, the U.S. official said. Many worry about a repeat of the massacre in El Geneina, in western Darfur, in late 2023, where R.S.F. fighters killed as many as 15,000 people, according to the United Nations.

“We fear that as the battle for the city intensifies, the worst is yet to come,” Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said at the United Nations in New York last week. “We should not allow this to happen.”

Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan.