Suba Dafallah was selling vegetables at a market in the Sudanese city of Nyala one morning in March when he got a distressing call from his sister, saying their mother would like to speak to him. “Come quickly. There are clashes in the town,” he recalled his mother saying.
He gathered his belongings, closed his stall and ran home as fast as he could.
Members of the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces in a civil war since April 2023, had attacked a military camp in the city, in South Darfur, and were rampaging through residential areas.
When he got to the family home, in Al-Jir neighbourhood, amid the chaos of gunshots and people scattering for their lives, he found the bloodied bodies of his mother and two sisters on the floor, with gunshot wounds. “There was a bullet in her heart,” the 25-year-old said of the moment he saw his mother.
Dafallah is one of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese people who have fled into neighbouring South Sudan. He is sheltering at the overcrowded Renk transit centre near the border, alongside more than 1,000 fellow nationals.
After seeing the bodies of his mother and two sisters, Dafallah stepped outside, to see another of his sisters being taken away by RSF fighters. One hit him with the butt of his rifle as he tried to stop them.
Dafallah’s sister cried out his name as she was put inside a car and tied up. He ran after the vehicle as it drove off, desperately calling her name, before collapsing.
He buried his mother and dead sisters two days later, then fled towards Renk, more than 800 miles away, trekking some of the way and hitching rides, taking nothing with him but the clothes on his back.
Along the way, in Ed Daein city, in East Darfur state, he witnessed another RSF attack, this time on a camp for internally displaced people. RSF fighters set a market on fire and went on looting sprees. In the chaos, he passed a woman who had been run over by a vehicle, her children left crying by the side of the road. “I tried to help but couldn’t,” he said.
The war in Sudan war has created what the UN has described as one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. More than 150,000 people have been killed, more than 14 million displaced, and a larger number still are in need of humanitarian aid.
The fighting, which is fuelled by foreign powers, has raged in the absence of a concerted international effort to end it.
“The scale of this crisis is one whose magnitude is not being properly recognised in the international system,” David Miliband, the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, said on a recent trip to Sudan. “Neglect is feeding division and division is feeding fear.”
The war has been marked by widespread brutality and atrocities, with multiple accounts of sexual violence as a weapon of war, and the discovery of hundreds of mass graves. Both warring parties have been accused of committing war crimes, and the RSF has been accused of committing genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
A report by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said at least 3,384 civilians were killed between January and June, mostly in the Darfur region, an RSF stronghold comprising five states in Sudan’s west and south. The region has been a centre of intense fighting in recent months, as the group pushes to maintain its territorial dominance there after losing the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, to the army in March.
The latest focus of the battle is El Fasher, the last remaining major city in Darfur controlled by the army. An estimated 260,000 people have been trapped for 16 months by an RSF siege that has cut off humanitarian assistance and caused starvation.
Darfurians like Dafallah from the across the country, not just the region itself, have headed to the borders with South Sudan and Chad for fear of being targeted by both warring parties because of their ethnic roots.
The RSF emerged from Arab Janjaweed militias that were co-opted by the regime of former president Omar al-Bashir from 2003 to help suppress an insurgency by non-Arab groups in Darfur.
Researchers at the Avaaz advocacy group say the RSF and its allies are continuing to ethnically target darker-skinned and non-Arab people. For their part, the army and its allies view Darfurians who did not flee areas formerly under RSF control as collaborators or sympathisers. The army is also suspicious about people from communities who formed part of the non-Arab resistance to the government and the Janjaweed in the 2000s.
“Anyone with deeply melanated skin is held with a lot of suspicion,” said Shayna Lewis, Sudan specialist at Avaaz .
‘There is no safe place’
The Renk transit centre was full of activity despite it being the rainy season. Children jumped in puddles while adults pursued humanitarian workers along paths to seek help or sold essential items laid out on tables. Men crouched to play Tok Ku Rou, a game that involves putting pebbles in holes on the ground.
Nadir Omar, another Darfurian, made a two-week journey in April to Renk from his home city of Ed Daein, where he was a farmer. He said he had no choice but to flee because RSF fighters were everywhere in the city, weapons were in the hands of civilians as well as soldiers, and the army was starting forcibly to recruit people.
As he travelled, he saw dead bodies by the side of the road in areas where fight had been particularly fierce.
Omar, who lost his brother and six other relatives when an army aircraft bombed a market in Ed Daein, left behind his pregnant wife and their four children. He hopes they can join him in South Sudan, then go together to Uganda, the country that hosts the largest number of refugees in Africa.
The fear of being targeted by both of the war’s protagonists hung over his head throughout the journey. At one stage, he and fellow travellers hitched a ride on in a lorry carrying goats and hid among the animals to avoid being spotted by government forces.
“If you decline recruitment, they accuse you of belonging to RSF, and it becomes difficult to defend yourself against that accusation,” the 35-year-old said. “If I met RSF, they would accuse me of being a member of the Sudanese army, and if I met the Sudanese army, they would accuse me of belonging to RSF.”
Darfurians living in other parts of the country have also fled to Renk for fear of persecution.
Gamal Issa, a retired soldier originally from Geneina city, in West Darfur state, had been living in Khartoum for years before leaving in June, a few months after the army recaptured the city.
The 44-year-old said government forces were targeting people from Darfurian communities and he no longer felt safe. Any connection to Darfur was enough to arouse suspicion of an RSF connection even, he said, in army-controlled territory.
“If you are from Darfur in general, you are not welcome in Khartoum,” he said. “Regardless of your ethnic group.”
Issa, who whose left leg was amputated after he was hit by an army drone strike on a market in Khartoum, travelled to Renk with his wife and their four children. He had lost his brother in another strike at the same market a month before. Two of his children, and a son-in-law, have disappeared since the war began.
“I believe there is no safe place to live in Sudan,” he said.
Dafallah, a mechanic and construction worker, was about to get engaged but his girlfriend disappeared when the war broke out. He was his family’s breadwinner after his father, a former Sudanese soldier, died. The mental anguish from the attack on his home is taking a toll. “At night, I have nightmares and scream my mother’s name in my sleep,” he said.
His goal is to get to the city of Wau in north-western South Sudan, where his mother was originally from, to live with his uncles. “Honestly, after they killed my family and my relatives scattered … I had no reason to stay in Sudan,” he said. “Even if the war stops, I will never return to Sudan.”
