One man’s story inside the siege of El Fasher, Sudan

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, one man's story from inside the siege of El Fasher.

0:20Before we begin, this episode contains descriptions of violence, so please do listen with care.

0:30Two weeks ago, a major turning point in Sudan's civil war unfolded.

0:39After a brutal 18-month siege, the city of El Fasha, the last stronghold of the Sudanese army in Darfur, fell to the Sudanese paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces, or the RSF. These jubilant Arab fighters filmed the capture of the last major army outpost in the west in the city of Al-Fasha, apparently sealing the division of the third biggest country in Africa after two and a half years of civil war.

1:12For over two years, both sides have been battling for control of the country. and now taking al-Fasha has given the RSF almost total control over the Darfur region, effectively partitioning the country in two. The scale of what's happening in Sudan can make it difficult to comprehend. More than 150 ,000 people have died. Hundreds of thousands more are starving. 14 million people have been displaced.

1:49Yesterday, as news broke that the RSF have agreed to a three-month ceasefire, we're going to bring you just one story from inside Al-Fashir. We are here in Al-Fashir and in a very difficult situation, you know. The story of a man who risked everything to tell the world about what's happening to people in Sudan. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. What the capture of al-Fasha means for the future of Sudan.

2:24Kumail Ahmed, you've been reporting on what's been happening in Sudan for The Guardian. We've spoke to you before about this on Today in Focus, but most recently you've been reporting on the story of Mohamed Duda. What did Mohamed do in Sudan? Mohamed was officially known as the spokesperson for Zamzam, which was a displacement camp in Sudan's Darfur region. And without him, there were very few ways to understand what was happening. He spoke a lot to journalists who would speak to us through WhatsApp or whatever. He would message with us, but he would speak to television channels often by phone.

3:01I'm so glad to have a chance to speak on the news, to tell our story. Whoever was covering what was happening in Zamzam or Al-Fajr would give interviews to them. I'm Mohamed Kamizduda and my family is struggling to find the food. Sometimes we share animal feeds with my family. But he didn't just speak out. He was physically active in helping his community and the people around him. He got them food, he got them water. He helped get treatment for the injured and ill. and in the worst situations he helped bury the dead.

3:41So two years into this war, Mohamed is in Zamzam, this huge displacement camp where he's speaking out on behalf of all the people there and, as you say, also doing all of this on-the-ground work too. What kind of a person was he? He wore glasses, a very smiley man, I think around his 30s. He was married and he had kids. many of his family left for Chad, but he remained with some members of his family. I spoke to one of his brothers and he said he was the person who protected and provided for all of us. So he was very important to his family as well as to everyone around him. Everyone around him in the displacement camps in Zamzam were displaced by violence in the 2000s.

4:30So I think they were survivors and that's what he was trying to do, survive and fight for the people around him to continue surviving, to protect them, to fight for the rights that they felt they had been deprived of. I mean, he sounds like an extraordinary person and really, really brave to be doing the work that he was doing. He was definitely extraordinary and he was always like so willing to engage and he was scared at times and yet he continued to do it. There was no moment where he stopped. For someone in the position he was, he was quite calm. I think I probably found it more difficult than him.

5:08I had it like sometimes I didn't know what to say to him. The situation, as I told you, was so bad. Yeah, I'm sorry. May Allah help you. How does like someone who's telling you about struggling to find food and then he's saying it really calmly and making do and working through it.

5:33And then Mohammed finds himself in the middle of what can only be described as a humanitarian catastrophe. Zamzam, where he was, the displacement camp in Sudan's Darfur region, was the centre of this horrific attack by the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF. What happened there and what happened to Mohammed? So in April this year, the RSF killed around 1 ,500 civilians in Zamzam over the course of only a few days. 20 shells were fired into the camp, forcing many others to flee once again. A guiding investigation found testimony of ethnically targeted slaughter, mass executions, large-scale abductions.

6:21and Mohammed, he'd heard about executions of healthcare workers, some of whom he knew. When he heard about it, he wanted to try and go there. But he ended up getting shot by some fighters. I mean, his description, the fighters were kind of basically rampaging through. They were shouting Gifnik slurs, shooting at people.

6:42After he was shot, he got dragged inside a house by people around him and they helped to treat him. They kind of tried to, by their time, wait out those early, really intense stages of the attack on Zamzam. So he was hiding in a house where this was all going on around him? Yeah. Just to get a sense, I mean, Zamzam, how many people were there? Just to get a sense of the scale. Zamzam had hundreds of thousands of people. I think it was about 600 ,000 people out there at the time. So Zamzam exists because similar violence was happening through the 2000s. Never really stopped. This is just the latest intensification of this violence against ethnic groups indigenous to Darfur.

7:22And this is part of a much bigger crisis. Across Sudan, over 11 million people have been displaced so far, making it the largest displacement crisis in the world right now. But what happened is, from 2023, as other parts of Darfur fell to the RSF, people would leave and go to Zamzam. Zamzam became the place where a lot of people sought safety. So as a human thing, it was also massive because these hundreds of thousands of people had to flee again.

8:00And how did you first get in contact with Mohammed? So I got in contact with Mohamed after the attack on Zamzam to speak out about what was happening there. And we've remained in contact ever since. So Mohamed is in this house. He's wounded. He's been shot. And he's been cared for by people in the camp. How did he manage to escape? It was very close to Al-Fashor, which is the main city of North Darfur. And basically his friends carried him through the night to safety. and they managed to get to El Fasha. Even though El Fasha itself was actually a place that had already been under siege, it wasn't easy to get to.

8:39But they managed to carry him there and get him to safety, or relative safety. Why did they go there? Why did they think this could be a place of more relative safety? I don't think they had many options. There was a Sudanese army base there, which has been the focus of the fighting over the last year and a half in El Fasha. and at least within El Fasha, which had the Sudanese army base, you were not under RSF control. And by this point, there are very few places in Daffel that are not under RSF control. So El Fasha was one of the last strongholds of the Sudanese army when he arrived. Could you just describe the city a bit to us?

9:21El Fasha is quite a well-established city, but around it is deserty landscape, quite remote. It's got real historical importance. And then also, more recently, it's like a hub for education. It's the hub for a lot of human rights work was done there. There was a big UN peacekeeping base until it got, the peacekeeping force was disbanded a few years ago. So it's got a lot of significance in Darfur's recent history, for sure. But what happens is, as everywhere else in Darfur falls, It takes in even more people and it becomes the focus of the rapid support forces. They want to take this city. So since the middle of 2024, it's been under quite a tight siege.

10:08They've prevented the entry of food, of water, of medicine. They've even built an earthen berm that dug up sand and piled it up and physically created a wall around the city. So they built a big earth wall around the city, enclosing the civilians inside. To physically control who can come in and out. So this city that was quite cosmopolitan in a way, like a hub for ideas and activism and education, is transformed into a prison, really.

10:44We are under siege and they are not allowed to enter any commercial goods or any humanitarian aid because of that rapid support force militia completely surrounded Al-Fashir. All of this time, Mohamed is there sending you messages about what he's experiencing. What did he tell you about what was unfolding? The two ways I think they experienced the combat on a day-to-day basis was hearing shelling, like artillery shelling, but also drones that they felt could kind of see everything and could see where you are. The fear was that if you're seen by a drone, then you were in danger and shelling might come next.

11:41On August 4th, he wrote, Our first struggle is the merciless hunger and the second is the constant artillery shelling Even the glow of a cigarette can alert the drones that fly overhead So once we finish our meals, there is nothing to do but sit in silence This is our daily life We live in hope that this nightmare will one day end

12:05I think the thing he said about the cigarette glow was like that kind of stuck out to me that it's such a small source of light. He feared that could give them away. I mean, it's so upsetting hearing that message, isn't it? Like the idea of being trapped in a city when you're starving and under bombardment. What was it like for you getting those messages? Yeah, it was difficult to hear them. Because you do feel a bit helpless. As a journalist, you kind of try to justify that you're talking to these people and maybe writing about it. It helps them somehow. or like helps get people engaged, but it is a bit like someone sharing this with you and you can't do much.

12:47And you just feel completely helpless. Yeah.

12:58By the last days of the siege, it was desperate. The children daily dying for malnutrition, and women, the elders also, So al-alfashir here, completely lack of medicines. His goal when he set out for the day was maybe to try and get millet or sorghum, which are grains they can kind of pound down into something called a cedar, which is like a Sudanese staple. But in reality, most of the time, they had to eat something called ombaz, which is like the byproduct of creating peanut oil, where the residue of the peanut is what's left. and actually that's generally used to feed animals. We just give this as a feed of animals.

13:43Right now become our basic male. By the end, they weren't even able to get that. He sent a video once of people cooking cow hides because there was nothing to eat.

14:01A lot of people relied on community kitchens to feed people. which took kind of donations and were able to gather whatever resources were available and hand out food. But by the end, it was so dangerous that the people running the community kitchens couldn't leave their homes. And so there was really nothing to eat. And you said before that when he arrived in Al-Fasha, he felt that Al-Fasha was one of the last places he could go that wasn't under RSF control and that it would be really dangerous for him to be in a place that did come under the control. of the Rapid Support Forces. Why was that?

14:39Well, because of the work he'd done speaking out against the RSF and speaking out about the kind of atrocities that he said were being carried out against people of Darfur. He felt he was being targeted. I think at any moment or any time, I will be targeted by a drone or a shield. He had heard from others that those who did try to leave and got caught by RSF fighters on the way were showing his picture to them and saying his name and saying like, is this guy still inside?

15:24And he said there are videos he's seen on social media where they were actually like saying by name that they're going to get him.

15:35one in Zamzam have evidence, have a reality of what happened in Zamzam, a reality of what happened in El Fashir. You must kill this person and don't let them get out from El Fashir to any other. So he was terrified and he was seriously considering leaving. He said, one of the things he said to me was that whenever his mind had a moment to think on something that wasn't survival. It was considering ways he might be able to get out. He wrote, On our way home, I suggested to my friend that we leave the city. He went silent. Then he showed me videos on his phone of young men being tortured by the RSF after they had tried to leave Al-Fasha.

16:23Then it's better for us to stay here until the end, I said.

16:48We spoke not long after, in September, when there was a big attack on a place called Abu shock in the north of El Fasha, which was also a displacement camp. And like in that weekend they bombed mosques while people were praying in them. And like I said, despite all the danger, he went there to try and help people. The view was so difficult. So many of the injured and wounded civilians were with no care. There had been so many occasions where it felt like the RSF were on the verge of victory. There was a Sudanese army battalion in there which was holding out, but they just intensified their attacks.

17:34And then, like, the end of September, it really felt to him like the end was going to be soon, that this fight would be over. And I think they felt quite abandoned. The siege had been building for months and months, more than a year. and when there was bombardment, they would go into these shelters, makeshift shelters that they created, which were basically, they dug a hole in the ground and they got a metal container and covered it. That container in the daylight is so hot, you know. It's not healthy. So he said people basically falling ill from having to spend the whole day hiding in holes. That's horrendous.

18:15It was unbearable.

18:23At this point, it's the end of September, beginning October. How worried were you at this point about him? Extremely worried. Quite often his phone would go dead and people I know who knew him or I knew other activists like him would become extremely worried and hope that, like the previous times, his phone would come back online and we'd be able to speak, but he never knew whether that would happen. It's extremely worrying. to know that someone in quite close contact with is at risk of being killed, basically. So when was the last time that you heard from Mohamed? So the last time we spoke and we managed to speak on the phone was on the 24th of September.

19:05And it seemed like your fascia was going to fall. It had calmed down a little bit better the time we spoke. And he said, I cannot leave the house anymore, even to get some food. Whenever someone moves, the drones attack. Every day the RSF gets closer, the world needs to act quickly. He's ready to kill everyone in an infatio, you know. Yes, we are appealing to humanitarian organisations and anywhere who are able to deal infatio. And that was one of the last messages you got from him. Yeah. I really hope you stay safe. Thank you We will get touch again Yeah, okay Alright, take care Please stay safe As much as you can Okay, okay Salam Thank you so much

19:59And when did you think Something might have gone wrong? Almost a month after that Was the So we're End of October End of October Attacks had continued And then Suddenly There's this like new outbursts like the violence has increased again suddenly the attack is very intense and we hear that the RSF have really made an advance into Ed Fasher this time and I spoke to some kind of activists who knew him and knew other activists and we knew their phones had gone offline and then what some people were actually saying is don't try to contact them because we know their phones are offline we know the RSF are actually inside this time and we've heard that they're checking people's phones for messages and any sign that they're speaking to people outside.

20:48I actually didn't message him during that period. I relied on people who knew him. It was just really worrying and there was that risk suddenly that you could put someone in more danger. The attack was on Sunday 26th. On Monday the 27th, we suddenly start seeing people saying, he's been killed.

21:13It was the first minute on social media. After a little while, I managed to get through to his brothers. They'd heard from people who were with him that he got caught and was killed. Oh, so sorry. Yeah.

21:31Do we know what happened to ordinary people, to civilians inside Al Fasher, after the RSF took the city? Inside the city, it's really hard to know the details. We don't completely know what's happened to probably around 200 ,000 people who are still inside. There have been a lot of mass killings. One of the ones we know is the Saudi Maternity Hospital. About 460 people were killed. We also saw some evidence of really large numbers of people being killed inside the engineering faculty of the University of El-Fasha. satellite images give us an indication of it. And the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, who have done loads of work over the last few years using satellite imagery to detect violence, have seen bloodstains on the streets of Al-Farsha.