Fleeing El Fasher’s Carnage
Sudan’s nearly three-year civil war reaches a brutal turning point in this piece, which centers on the fall of El Fasher in late October and the harrowing journeys of survivors now sheltering in refugee camps across eastern Chad. The Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.) seized the city after an 18‑month siege, gaining near-total control of North Darfur and unleashing a massacre whose full scale remains unknown as El Fasher stays effectively sealed off from the outside world.
As the R.S.F. swept through El Fasher, witnesses describe a killing spree marked by executions, rape and sexual violence, illustrated by a verified video showing a fighter shooting a pleading survivor. The U.N.’s migration agency estimates that around 100,000 people have fled the city, leaving more than 150,000 unaccounted for, while overall the war has displaced over 12 million people across Sudan.
With direct access to El Fasher impossible, the photographer and writer Ivor Prickett reports from refugee camps like Oure Cassoni and the border town of Tine in Chad, now hosting roughly 900,000 Sudanese displaced from Darfur and beyond. There, he gathers testimonies that detail not only the violence of the city’s fall but also the hunger, disease and exhaustion that define life in the camps.
One of the most searing accounts comes from 35‑year‑old Manahil Suleiman Ishaq, who recalls sending her 14‑year‑old son, Rami, to look for food just days before the city fell, only for him to return mortally wounded by an explosion. Pregnant and under fire, she says she asked his forgiveness, knowing he would not survive, before fleeing with her other children—leaving her son behind as the family tried to escape the encroaching violence.
Ishaq describes a monthlong journey from El Fasher to Oure Cassoni during which her brother was killed and she herself was shot in the back by a sniper. Now, sitting outside the camp’s deteriorating hospital, she carries a surviving unborn child and the trauma of the son and sibling she lost along the way.
Oure Cassoni, founded in 2004 during the earlier Darfur genocide, has doubled in size over the past year and now shelters more than 100,000 refugees, many of them women and children. Despite its history as a sanctuary, it is one of Chad’s most remote camps, and aid from the Chadian government and international agencies has not kept pace with the influx, leaving newcomers struggling for clean water, food and medical care.
The article also follows Mustafa, a 16‑year‑old who fled El Fasher with four friends after witnessing R.S.F. fighters execute four members of his neighbor’s family. Attempting to escape at night, they were captured near the village of Qarni, lined up and interrogated—then watched as two of their group were killed after asking for food and water, before being tied to a tree and abandoned.
Local villagers eventually freed the surviving boys after two days, telling them to run, and three of them made it to Oure Cassoni, where Mustafa stayed while two friends continued onward toward Libya. His story underscores the constant risk of execution, extortion and arbitrary detention that haunts any attempt to leave R.S.F.-controlled areas.
Another central testimony comes from Hussam Altaher, who was at home with his father and cousins when he heard the now-familiar buzz of a drone over El Fasher in late August. Moments later, a bomb hit their house, killing his relatives instantly and leaving him badly wounded, reliant on the last functioning hospital in the city, Al Saudi, which itself was operating with minimal medicine and supplies.
Altaher stayed at Al Saudi for two months, then fled with his mother on a donkey cart on October 26, just before the city’s fall. Two days later, R.S.F. troops reportedly massacred more than 400 patients at the hospital, according to the World Health Organization, a slaughter Altaher narrowly escaped only to be detained with his mother and forced to pay a ransom of about $5,600 to secure their release.
The journey out of Sudan often passes through Tine, a small border town about 100 miles south of Oure Cassoni, where hundreds gather awaiting transport to more permanent camps. Among them are young men like Ali Ishag, who lost a leg in an earlier airstrike that killed his entire family, and his friend Yahia Rizig, who carried Ishag on his back for seven days as they traveled mostly at night to avoid being “cut” by fighters.
Rizig describes them as “like bats,” moving under cover of darkness and relying on convoys of trucks lined with jerrycans and bundles—whatever refugees could salvage from their former lives. Even after reaching Chad, they must register and wait as overstretched camps like Oure Cassoni strain under long lines for water and dwindling resources, yet for many, this precarious existence is still preferable to the abyss they left behind in El Fasher.
