The French global charity, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is warning that fighting between warring sides in Sudan is creating a desperate situation for civilians in El Fasher and its outlying areas.
A new report by MSF seen by APA on Thursday exposes systematic patterns of violence in the area, that includes looting, mass killings, sexual violence, abductions, and starvation.
MSF who called for grant access for humanitarian organisations to provide critical aid to people in need urges the warring parties of the conflict to halt indiscriminate and ethnically targeted violence and facilitate an immediate large-scale humanitarian response.
”While daily fighting in El Fasher is already putting lives at risk, MSF is extremely concerned about the threats of a full-blown assault on the hundreds of thousands of people in the city” it says.
The report, titled ”Besieged, Attacked, Starved”, outlines a desperate situation for civilians in and around El Fasher that requires immediate attention and response.
“People are not only caught in indiscriminate heavy fighting between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their respective allies – but also actively targeted by the RSF and its allies, notably on the basis of their ethnicity,” Michel Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergencies is quoted as saying.
Based on MSF data, direct observations and over 80 interviews conducted between May 2024 and May 2025 with patients and people who were displaced from El Fasher and nearby Zamzam camp, the report exposes systematic patterns of violence that includes looting, mass killings, sexual violence, abductions, starvation and attacks against markets, health facilities, and other civilian infrastructure.
“As patients and communities tell their stories to our teams and asked us to speak out, while their suffering is hardly on the international agenda, we felt compelled to document these patterns of relentless violence that have been crushing countless lives in general indifference and inaction over the past year,” says Mathilde Simon, MSF’s humanitarian affairs advisor.
The report also details how the RSF and their allies conducted a large-scale ground offensive in April on Zamzam camp for displaced people, located outside of El Fasher, which caused an estimated 400,000 people to flee in less than three weeks in appalling conditions.
A large portion of the camp’s population fled to El Fasher, where they remained trapped, out of reach of humanitarian aid and exposed to attacks and further mass violence, MSF says.
Tens of thousands more escaped to Tawila, about 60 kilometres away, and to camps across the Chadian border, where hundreds of survivors of violence received care from MSF teams.
“In light of the ethnically motivated mass atrocities committed on the Masalit in West Darfur back in June 2023, and of the massacres perpetrated in Zamzam camp in North Darfur, we fear such a scenario will be repeated in El Fasher. This onslaught of violence must stop,” says Simon.
The report quotes several witnesses saying that RSF soldiers spoke of plans to ‘clean El Fasher’ of its non-Arab community.
Since May 2024, the RSF and their allies have besieged El Fasher, Zamzam camp, and other surrounding localities, cutting communities off from food, water, and medical care.
This has contributed to the spread of famine and debilitated the humanitarian response, according to the MSF.
Repeated attacks on healthcare facilities forced MSF to end our medical activities in El Fasher in August 2024 and in Zamzam camp in February 2025.
In May 2024 alone, health facilities supported by MSF in El Fasher endured at least seven incidents of shelling, bombing or shooting by all warring parties. Indiscriminate airstrikes conducted by the SAF had devastating consequences.
“The SAF bombed our neighbourhood by mistake, then came to apologise. SAF planes sometimes bombed civilian areas without any RSF [presence], I saw it in different places,” the report quotes one woman as claiming.
Thousands mostly civilians have been killed and more than 3 million rendered homeless since Sudan descended into civil war in April 2023.
WN/as/APA