Crawling to escape slaughter, people flee Sudan paramilitary group on their hands and knees

“Many of them are telling us that they have had to hide for days in the desert, crawl on their elbows so that they are not spotted, they are not targeted and they are not kidnapped,” Saraf said Thursday at a briefing from the town.

With el-Fasher under a communications blackout, it has been left to eyewitness accounts like Musa’s, videos shared to social media and an analysis of satellite imagery to reveal the scale of what is unfolding in the key regional capital, which was home to around 250,000 people before the Sudanese military left.

Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, said that after studying high-resolution satellite images, he concluded there were “too many” bodies to count.

But he estimated that tens of thousands of people had been killed after RSF fighters took the city around two weeks ago following the Sudanese military’s withdrawal.

“Body disposal operations have picked up pace,” he said, adding that his team had found evidence of mass graves and bodies being burned in el-Fasher.

NBC News has asked the RSF for comment on the latest satellite analysis. An RSF leader told Reuters on Friday that investigations were underway and anyone proved to have committed abuses would be held accountable, but that reports of violations in el-Fasher had been exaggerated by the army and its allies.

Widespread abuses

Led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — a former camel dealer widely known as Hemedti — the RSF has been fighting the Sudanese military for more than two years after he fell out with the country’s top commander and de facto ruler, Gen. Abdel-Fattah al Burhan.

Prior to that, both men were part of the military establishment that helped oust longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Two years later, they agreed to rule together after a coup that brought down the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.

However, their alliance spectacularly broke down over how to manage the transition to a civilian government, and with neither seemingly willing to cede power, fighting broke out.

Since then, both sides have been accused of widespread abuses. In one of its last acts, the Biden administration declared that the RSF and its allies were committing genocide in a war that has led to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with part of the country, including the el-Fasher area, plunged into famine. Over 14 million people have fled their homes.

With so many displaced and reliable data unavailable, estimates vary widely on the number of dead, but as of May the United Nations said 40,000 people had been killed. Aid groups say the true death toll could be many times higher. Over 24 million people are also facing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.

The RSF said Thursday said it would agree to the truce “in order to address the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of the war and to enhance the protection of civilians.” The ceasefire would “ensure the urgent delivery of humanitarian assistance to all Sudanese people,” the group added about the proposal put forward by a mediator group known as the Quad and made up of the U.S., Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.