Camps sheltering families fleeing El-Fasher are reaching breaking point, aid workers say, as thousands continue escaping the besieged city in Sudan’s North Darfur on foot and arriving with stories of violence, hunger, and exhaustion.
Doctors working in the camps say they are overwhelmed. Clinics are packed with malnourished children, pregnant women in distress, and people injured by shrapnel or beatings during their escape. Clean water, basic medicines, and food are already in critically short supply, and new arrivals are still coming.
“We walked in the streets for two days on our feet,” said Rawda Mohamed, who fled El-Fasher. “If the cars of the Rapid Support Forces found you, they beat you. If they didn’t see you, then you won’t get beaten. In Karni, we walked for a period of eight hours.”
When asked what she witnessed on the way out, she didn’t hesitate: “In the street, we saw beating, raping, whipping… anything. Even running people over with their cars.”
Humanitarian workers say stories like hers are becoming common among those escaping areas recently captured by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who have been repeatedly accused by the United Nations of killing civilians and using sexual violence, particularly against non-Arab communities in Darfur.
Conditions inside El-Fasher before the escape were described as “unlivable.”
“We lived through a very big crisis… continuous shelling by drones, artillery and random bullets,” said Othman Mohamed, another displaced resident. “Food also took a hit, it was a complete siege. There was no food at all. We reached the point where we were eating ombaz… then ombaz was not even available.”
He said fleeing the city meant stepping over people who didn’t survive the journey out.
“There were dead bodies on the streets… people who collapsed because of the walking, exhaustion and harassment. They would ask for water. If you had it, you would give them some, and if not, you left them in the streets — women and children. Most of them were women and children.”
Sudan’s war between the national army and the RSF, which escalated after a power struggle between their commanders in 2023, has driven millions from their homes and created one of the world’s worst hunger and displacement crises, according to international agencies. The UN and aid groups have warned repeatedly that civilians in Darfur face targeted attacks and that access for humanitarian relief is dangerously restricted.
Now, camps that were already struggling say they are past capacity. Tents have spilled into open ground. Some families are sleeping in groups under sheets of plastic. Latrines are few. Water is rationed. Doctors say preventable deaths are starting to rise.
With more people expected to flee as fighting spreads, aid workers say the system is on the edge of collapse. They are calling for immediate humanitarian access corridors, large-scale emergency food delivery, medical supplies, and international funding — not in weeks or months, but now — warning that without it, the next wave of arrivals may find no help left at all.
