After four months of civil war in Sudan, morgues in its capital city, Khartoum, have reached their capacity, leaving thousands of corpses to rot on the streets as doctors warn of a looming cholera outbreak.
Khartoum’s morgues have reached “breaking point,” international aid group Save The Children said on August 8. Bodies in the morgues are also decomposing as prolonged power outages have left them without refrigeration. There is also no medical staff left, leaving the corpses “exposed and untreated.”
This is the latest nightmare facing Sudan after months of intense fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which broke out in mid-April as both parties tried to seize control of Khartoum.
The violence has killed tens of thousands of people. “A horrifying combination of rising numbers of corpses, severe water shortages, non-functioning hygiene and sanitation services, and lack of water treatment options are also prompting fears of a cholera outbreak in the city,” Save The Children said in a statement.
Cholera often becomes epidemic in war zones, spreading rapidly through contaminated water. Mostly arid Sudan typically experiences some cases of cholera during its brief rainy season, which began in June, but it is reportedly much worse this year.
Cholera can kill within hours if left untreated. Most of the hospitals in the capital and other states are out of service, Save the Children notes.
Sudanese medical workers are warning of coming outbreaks. Abdallah Attiya of the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate told the Al Arabiya news channel of “disease and epidemiological disasters” amid the overcrowding of morgues.
“The inability to give those who have died a dignified burial is yet another element of the suffering of families in Khartoum,” said Dr. Bashir Kamal Eldin Hamid on August 8. “We are seeing a health crisis in the making, on top of a crisis of sorrow, fear and pain,” he said.
The civil war got bloodier this week, with the competing factions both claiming to have inflicted heavy damage on the other. The RSF seems to be slowly gaining strength versus the SAF.
Residents of Omdurman, Sudan largest city which is just north of Khartoum, say fighting got worse on Tuesday, including heavy artillery and bombardment overnight.
“The Sudanese army started by bombarding RSF stations scattered across different neighborhoods, to which the RSF responded by striking civilian homes and areas with anti-aircraft missiles,” says Mossab, an Omdurman resident.
Much of Khartoum is in ruins, and neighboring cities show massive damage. More than 4 million people have fled the violence across Sudan since the fighting broke out, with at least two million fleeing Khartoum and neighboring cities like Omdurman.
Around 20.3 million people across the country – more than 42% of its population – are now experiencing severe acute hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC).
In June Hala, Alkarib fled Khartoum, where she was the regional director for an east African NGO. “I would say 75% or more of Khartoum inhabitants have experienced looting,” she said. “Our homes were completely looted, our vehicles, our personal properties, our papers and documents were destroyed and burned.”
Most of the looting was done by one of the warring factions, the Rapid Support Forces run by General Hamdan Dagalo. “The presence on the ground inside residential areas being in Khartoum, in Al Fasher, in Nyala or in [El] Geneina, the RSF strategy is to run a war from within and inside civilian residencies,” Alkarib said. “The RSF are the extension of the Janjaweed. It’s been done for over 20 years in rural Darfur, where villagers were terrorized, and infrastructure was completely destroyed.”
Sudan’s army created the RSF, which later turned on the army. The army created the Janjaweed militias two decades ago to fight insurgents in western Sudan’s Darfur region. They later were organized into the RSF. The RSF and the Janjaweed militias engaged in ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, killing up to 400,000 people in Darfur between 2003 and 2020, most of them innocent civilians. The army had difficulty fighting the Darfur insurgents before creating the RSF, because the army itself was composed of many troops from Darfur, who might be reluctant to kill members of their own ethnic groups. The army used its Darfuri troops, who were Muslim, to fight Christian and animist insurgents in south Sudan, which was waging a decades-long fight for independence. (South Sudan became independent in 2011, and promptly was plagued by its own civil war, between the Dinka and the Nuer). So it needed other people, like the RSF, to fight for it in Darfur.
Today, the RSF is fighting Sudan’s army for control of the country, and seems to have taken control of most of the capital.
Meanwhile, back in Darfur, the RSF is engaged in ethnic cleansing against the Masalit people. It has largely destroyed the city of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur province, and the home to 250,000 people, most of them Masalit. Over 15,000 people had been killed in the city of El Geneina as of mid-June, and up to three-quarters of its population have fled to the neighboring country of Chad, one of the poorest and most backward countries on Earth. Bodies lie in the street, and there are bodies lying by the side of the road all the way to Chad.
Khamis Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered in El Geneina hours after he accused the RSF of “genocide“, in a June 14 statement to a Saudi news channel. “Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,” he said in an interview with Al Hadath TV, pleading with the UN to intervene to protect people in the city. “The entire city is under the RSF and the [Arab] militias cooperate with them. Today, all of el-Geneina is destroyed.”
The RSF has targeted Masalit refugee camps, killed people attempting to escape to neighboring Chad, kidnapped and raped women and systematically killed influential figures in the community, such as tribal leaders and human rights lawyers and monitors.
Months of bickering between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, ended in a civil war between the RSF and the army that began on April 15. Ten days later, they took their armed struggle to West Darfur.
However, the army quickly retreated from Darfur, leaving control in the hands of RSF fighters and allied Arab militias.
Arab militias and RSF fighters are guarding all exit points from the city and demanding bribes from families trying to flee.
Ahmad Hagar said on Friday that he paid the equivalent of $500 to militias so that he could escape on May 28 with his wife and five children. He blamed the Sudanese army for failing to intervene to defend the Masalit. “Arab militias cooperate with the RSF and the army is silent,” he said.
The specter of being killed by the RSF drove influential figures such as the Masalit tribal chief, Sultan Sa’at, to flee along with his family. They left shortly after Arab fighters raided his brother’s home and killed him, according to Nahid Hamid, the sultan’s wife. “After his older brother was killed in his home, the sultan and his entire family fled. His children, his brothers and sisters and everybody.”
The US State Department said America “condemns in the strongest terms the ongoing human rights violations and abuses and horrific violence in Sudan, especially reports of widespread sexual violence and killings based on ethnicity in West Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias.”
Seven weeks into the conflict between the army and the RSF, the U.S. imposed travel and economic sanctions on members of Sudan’s warring factions. By the beginning of June, tens of thousands had already died of starvation, and thousands had already been killed by gunfire and artillery shells.
More than 13.6 million children are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan as fighting has cut off the transportation of food stuffs. Children in orphanages have died in droves as snipers and fighting make it hard for orphanage workers to go to markets to buy food, or even get to work to feed the orphans. In one orphanage in Sudan’s capital, at least 60 infants, toddlers and older children perished while trapped in harrowing conditions as fighting raged outside. Most died from lack of food and from fever. Twenty-six died in two days in late May.
An 85-year-old British citizen was shot by snipers and his wife died of starvation after they were unable to leave Sudan. Faced with starvation and with no water, the man left his wife to seek help. While he was away he was shot three times – in his hand, chest and lower back – by snipers. He survived after being taken to a relative in another part of Khartoum. His wife was left to fend for herself and it was impossible for his relatives to reach her in an area surrounded by snipers. As a result she died of starvation.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries in Africa, such as to Egypt, Sudan’s northern neighbor, and to Sudan’s western neighbor Chad, even though Chad is one of the poorest and most backward places on Earth (so backward that countless people die of diarrheal diseases there, and much of the population goes hungry).
