“It never gets easier to watch people die from space,” says a weary Nathaniel Raymond.
The veteran human rights investigator is monitoring the enciriclement of the Sudanese city of El Fasher in almost-real-time, via high-resolution satellite images.
The capital of the state of North Darfur could be about to fall to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies, as they fight against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the country’s year-long civil war.
On Friday, Raymond told Global News he believes some RSF troops have made it inside the city limits.
El Fasher is the last city still under SAF control in the vast eastern region of Darfur. It hosts hundreds of thousands of people who have fled violence elsewhere.
“The information is clear. We know what’s going to happen. (The RSF) has motive. They have intent. They’ve literally killed before, over and over again. And they’ve stated what they want to do here,” says Raymond, who is executive director at the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health.
“The worst case is Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-level casualties.”
The RSF has been accused of mass-killings and mass-rapes throughout the war. Most notably in the West Darfur capital of El Geneina, where 10,000-15,000 people were killed in ethnically targeted killings last year, according to a panel of United Nations experts.
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“The amount of people from groups that they have targeted for killing is five times larger than El Geneina here, if not bigger. And so they’ll have a question about the modality of killing. Will they waste the bullets? How will they do it?” says Raymond.
“The job for me and my team is to position ourselves to move from warning, as the warning phase ends, to documentation — to capture evidence for future accountability.”
The conflict which began in April 2023 has triggered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with around eight million people displaced.
A resident of a camp in El Fasher named Tagaldeen told a news briefing on Thursday that the city faces a drinking water shortage in the next few days, due to a lack of fuel for generators.
“There are many families here who rely on only one meal a day. The RSF surrounding El Fasher threatens the citizens with death – by hunger and thirst,” said Tagaldeen.
“We ask the international community to intervene urgently to save the citizens in Darfur, and in El Fasher especially.”
This week the U.N. and the United States highlighted concerns about the situation in El Fasher.
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U.N. officials warned the U.N. Security Council last week that around 800,000 people in El Fasher were in “extreme and immediate danger.”
Two decades ago, Hollywood actor George Clooney was among those to bring international attention to ethnically-driven mass killings in Darfur
The U.N. and African Union established a peacekeeping presence in the region in 2007 until its mandate ended in 2020.
Raymond says ending that mission has contributed to what is now playing out in Darfur.
“Darfur is about to succumb to the RSF. And there’s no chant, there’s no wristband, there’s no celebrity on the Today Show. There’s just the human reality of what’s about to occur, and it is occurring in darkness and in silence,” said Raymond.
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