PORT SUDAN: Families hid in trenches, bodies lay in the streets and children were killed in front of their parents as Sudanese paramilitaries advanced into the western city of El-Fasher, survivors told AFP.
More than 36,000 civilians have fled the city since Sunday, when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured the army’s last stronghold in the Darfur region, triggering warnings from the UN and humanitarian groups of possible mass killings and ethnic cleansing.
Some have sought refuge in Tawila, a town around 70 kilometers (43 miles) to the west that is already sheltering some 650,000 displaced people.
In satellite phone interviews with AFP, three survivors who reached Tawila described scenes of terror and loss during their escape from a city besieged by the RSF for 18 months, cut off from food, medicine and other aid.
Their accounts echoed those of survivors of the mass killings in Darfur in the early 2000s, when Janjaweed militias — the forces accused of genocide there which later became the RSF — burned villages, killed some 300,000 people and displaced 2.7 million more.
