‘Escape or starve’: life inside Sudan’s city under siege

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1. Orphaned and raising three sisters alone, the youngest just five, Hafiza has only ever known life in a Darfur displacement camp. Born after her parents fled the genocidal Janjaweed militia in the early 2000s, she is now trying to survive the militia’s reincarnation — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — as they bombard and deliberately starve the city around her.

   The 22-year-old was studying to be an English teacher when Sudan’s civil war shut down her university in El Fasher, where she and her sisters are among hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped on a front line between the army and the RSF. Many are in displacement camps where monitors warn famine has already set in and malnutrition has led to at least 60 deaths in the past week.

   The girls’ mother was killed in front of them last year when a busy market was shelled.

   “I’ve seen ten or 15 people killed at a time from the bombardments,” Hafiza said in a call from the city’s Abu Shouk displacement camp. Attacks have intensified in recent months after the RSF was ousted from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Alongside the bombardments, a slower crisis is unfolding. “People are also dying more slowly, from starvation,” she said.

   Between searching for food for her siblings, who are now severely underweight, Hafiza works at a charity clinic in the camp, cleaning wounds from the latest shelling and holding a phone torch while medics operate.

   Aid convoys are blocked, electricity and clean water are non-existent and hospitals have collapsed. International aid organisations have condemned the “calculated use of starvation as a weapon of war.”

   Since April 2023, [Sudan’s war](https://www.thetimes.com/world/africa/article/warring-factions-push-sudan-towards-partition-jqmlf2h2p) has killed at least 150,000 people and displaced more than ten million in what the United Nations calls the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis. Both sides face allegations of war crimes. The United States has formally determined that the RSF and its allied Arab militias are committing genocide in Darfur, accusing them of ethnically targeted massacres and widespread sexual violence against the same black African ethnic groups — including Hafiza’s Fur community in Darfur — that were killed in their hundreds of thousands during the genocide of the early 2000s.

2. And if any faction wins the governance of Sudan will change probably not at all.

3. People should be protesting

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