Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese civilians, who had already endured months of famine, have fled in “disastrous conditions” after paramilitaries overran their camp in Darfur, medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday.
“We are treating children who were literally dying of thirst on their journeys,” MSF project coordinator Marion Ramstein said from the small town of Tawila, a 60-kilometre desert trek from the Zamzam camp outside El-Fasher.
“We have received so far over 170 people with gunshot and blast injuries and 40 percent of them are women and girls,” she added.
Aid groups say up to one million people were sheltering in the sprawling Zamzam camp when the paramilitaries launched their bloody assault last week.
The United Nations says up to 400,000 residents have fled the camp, which the paramilitaries announced they had overrun on Sunday.
Around half of those have sought refuge in Tawila, where MSF’s Thibault Hendler says they are “facing an absolutely catastrophic situation”.
“There is no water source, no sanitation facilities and no food,” Hendler told AFP from an area of the town he said was “a completely empty lot just a week ago” but is now crammed with desperate families.
“Since last week, we’ve seen people arrive by the truckload to an area that simply cannot accomodate so many,” he said.
‘Shooting and burning’
Tawila is controlled by an armed group that has kept out of the devastating conflict between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the regular army that broke out in April 2023.
But many of the new arrivals interviewed by AFP spoke of harrowing ordeals at the hands of RSF fighters on the way from Zamzam.
Many said fighters had robbed them of their donkeys and what meagre possessions they had been able to bring with them.
Several women, arriving with their clothes torn, said they had been raped by RSF fighters on the road.
MSF said that in Zamzam, fighters had been “going door to door, shooting people hiding in their homes and burning large parts of the camp”.
“People tell us that many injured and vulnerable people could not make the trip to Tawila and were left behind,” Ramstein said.
Two years of war between the RSF and the army have killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 13 million.
The army’s recapture of Khartoum last month prompted the paramilitaries to redouble their efforts to capture the whole of the vast western region of Darfur.
They have launched a major offensive against the besieged North Darfur state capital of El-Fasher, the last major city in the region still in the hands of the army.
