The noose is tightening on the city of El-Fasher. "We're like hostages awaiting imminent execution," said Omar Mohammed Adam, who lives in a camp for displaced persons north of the western Sudanese city. Having seized four of the Darfur region's five provinces over the past 12 months, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo – known by his nickname Hemedti – are massing around the capital of North Darfur, the last bastion of the region under the control of the regular army, led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan.
The capture of this strategic city would give the paramilitaries almost total control over a territory the size of France. While skirmishes are currently concentrated on the north-eastern flank of El-Fasher, "the fighting is getting closer," said the head of the Abu Shok camp, contacted by telephone. "There are shells falling at random, killing civilians." More than 60 people have been killed in shelling or exchanges of fire over the past four weeks.
El-Fasher is densely populated. Since 2003, the city has been home to hundreds of thousands of survivors of the conflict that claimed more than 300,000 lives when then-President Omar al-Bashir launched an ethnic cleansing operation in the rebel province. Since April 15, tens of thousands of civilians from all over Darfur have joined the more than one million pre-war residents, fleeing the advance of the RSF.
In mid-April, when they took control of the city of Mellit, 70 km to the north, paramilitaries cut off the main roads leading to El-Fasher, imposing a blockade on its residents. "Commercial convoys no longer enter the city from northern Sudan, Libya or Chad. We're being cut off from the world," continued Adam.
"The markets have almost run out of supplies," added Abdallah Hassan, a former day laborer from El-Fasher who, like most residents, has lost all sources of income. He described his daily life as survival: electricity and drinking water networks have been cut off, fuel is in short supply, as is medicine, and food prices are soaring. "If we have lunch, we don't have dinner. If we have dinner, we won't have lunch. We're going to die slowly," he said in voice messages sent via WhatsApp.
An inescapable spiral
The siege of the city is obstructing all humanitarian access. "According to the nutritional surveys we carried out in April, the city is on the brink of famine. We estimate that nearly a third of children under five in the Zamzam camp are severely malnourished. This is double the emergency threshold. They could die within three to six weeks," explained Jérôme Tubiana, Darfur specialist and operations adviser to medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF). He estimates it would take almost 400 truckloads of aid a month to avert catastrophe. Even before the siege imposed by the RSF, only a handful of humanitarian convoys had reached El-Fasher in the past year.
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