TAWILA: In the suffocating darkness of a sealed shipping container, every thud signalled to Ibrahim Noureldin that one more detainee had died in the crush as Sudanese paramilitary fighters kept forcing more men inside.
Thousands of people are estimated to have been detained in the Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) October takeover of North Darfur’s El-Fasher, a battle that a UN investigation found bore the “hallmarks of genocide.”
“When people died of thirst and hunger, we were beaten and forced to bury them outside,” 42-year-old Noureldin said.
“We were put to work, lifting their luggage, materials, weapons. If we moved too slowly, they beat us with whips,” he told AFP from Tawila — an overwhelmed refugee town west of El-Fasher now sheltering hundreds of thousands of people.
In February, the United Nations’ rights office and the London-based Center for Information Resilience (CIR) said that the RSF had converted hospitals, schools, warehouses and shipping containers — like the easy-to-lock, inescapable box that nearly killed Noureldin — into a sprawling network of makeshift prisons.
