Aisha had wanted to stay with her husband when the Rapid Support Forces laid siege to the Sudanese city of El Fasher earlier this year. But as the shelling and bombing escalated, and supplies of essentials ran low, she was left with no choice.
“There’s nothing there, no water to drink or food to eat,” said the 31-year-old, who is married to a soldier in the regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and did not want to give her last name. “I will never return.”
Her escape through the city’s western gate – the only one not controlled by the RSF – was fraught with risk. “Several times when I tried to board a lorry a shell landed nearby, and I ran away,” said Aisha from the relative safety of a road heading west to Tawila, a town controlled by a rebel group that has – for now – stayed neutral in Sudan’s civil war. “I came back week after week to try again.”
Aid workers estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have followed the same route in recent months, taking a road that follows a V-shape around the Zamzam refugee camp then runs west to Tawila and beyond.
The road is dotted with checkpoints consisting of pieces of wood placed on car tyres and manned by men carrying AK-47s who demand money to let vehicles pass. Ahmed Konchi, who makes a living as a lorry driver ferrying people out of El Fasher, said the demands had risen in recent weeks. “I have to pay at least 5,000 Sudanese pounds (£6) at every checkpoint, and there are more than 15 now,” he said. “This increases the cost of a place on the lorry, and many families cannot afford it.”
The RSF, a paramilitary group that emerged from the feared Janjaweed militia, launched a new offensive to take El Fasher from the SAF in late September. Its capture would give the RSF control of every major population centre in Darfur, the vast region of western Sudan that has witnessed some of the most brutal fighting and abuses since war broke out in April 2023 between the SAF and the RSF.
Aid agencies have repeatedly said that Sudan is the world’s most forgotten humanitarian crisis. The war has already killed tens of thousands of people. Estimates range widely from 20,000 to 150,000, according to medics. It has also created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises.
More than 10 million people, around a fifth of Sudan’s population, have been forced from their homes inside the country and another 2 million have fled to neighbouring states, according to the UN. Half of those who remain face crisis levels of hunger. Famine was declared in one area in Darfur in August, and experts said there was a risk of famine in 13 other areas.
There is a shorter route directly west out of El Fasher, along smaller roads, that some others have taken, but it is even more dangerous. Bandits and armed groups roam the area, targeting civilian convoys.
“On roads outside the city, civilians have faced gross human rights abuses,” said Toby Harward, the UN deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan. “They have had their belongings stolen, their carts destroyed and their donkeys shot dead by bandits usually aligned with the RSF. Civilians are suffering hideous cruelties perpetrated by gangs who have no respect for basic rights and dignities.”
In the town of Shakra the lorries are met by fighters of the Sudan Liberation Army, the rebel group that – for now at least – remains neutral and controls an area centred on the Marrah mountain range. Every Monday and Friday SLA convoys escort the refugees further west to Tawila.
But danger lurks even under the protection of the SLA, as the roads are also used by the RSF and aligned militias. In one incident in August four people were killed and several others injured when militias targeted an armed convoy.
“The RSF and other armed groups know the days that we escort civilians, so usually nobody is harmed,” said Amar Eissa, who is in charge of the SLA in the Tawila area. “Only if there is an attack on civilians do we intervene militarily.”
Another wife of an SAF soldier said she had left alongside dozens of women like her. “All the army wives are leaving now,” she said. “[Abdel Fattah al-] Burhan [the head of the SAF], has said he is going to fight to the last soldier.”
Many of those leaving El Fasher had already been displaced at least once from elsewhere in Darfur, fleeing towns and cities that fell to the RSF last year.
The Guardian saw people suffering from malnutrition on the road west, including children.
“People leaving El Fasher are not just trying to escape war, they are also trying to survive hunger,” said Jérôme Tubiana, an operational adviser for the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières. “Those newly displaced people are not able to leave Sudan. Instead they have to survive in a rebel area, where security may be better than in El Fasher, but relief, food and health services are unlikely to be better.”
The meagre supplies that reached the city through the western gate have dwindled in recent weeks, as traders shun the area due to the risk of violence and expense of paying off the men at checkpoints. Mahdi Jamal, a fruit and vegetable seller from the town of Golo, said he had recently decided to stop visiting El Fasher. “More than three-quarters of what I made was going to the people on the checkpoints,” he said. “It wasn’t worth it.”
For those who remain – either through choice or circumstance – the prospect of an RSF victory carries the threat of widespread atrocities, particularly for those perceived by the militiamen as belonging to the same communities as leaders of armed movements aligned with the SAF.
Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, said last week: “From bitter past experience, if El Fasher falls, there is a high risk of ethnically targeted violations and abuses, including summary executions and sexual violence.”
Or as Aisha put it: “In El Fasher you face only death.”
