“It’s never easier to watch people die from space,” says a weary Nathaniel Raymond.
The veteran human rights investigator is monitoring the siege of the Sudanese city of El Fasher in almost real time, through high-resolution satellite images.
The capital of North Darfur state could be about to fall into the hands of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies, as they fight the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the country’s year-long civil war. country.
On Friday, Raymond told Global News that he believes some RSF troops have managed to enter the city limits.
El Fasher is the last town still under control of the Sudanese Armed Forces in the vast eastern region of Darfur. It houses hundreds of thousands of people who have fled violence elsewhere.
“The information is clear. We know what is going to happen. (RSF) has reasons. They have intention. They have literally killed before, over and over again. And they have stated what they want to do here,” says Raymond, executive director of the Humane Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health.
“The worst case scenario is the casualties at the level of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
FILE – General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, then deputy head of the military council, salutes during a rally in Galawee, northern Sudan, June 15, 2019. Sudan has been torn by war for a year, torn by fighting between the army and the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. (AP Photo, file).
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The RSF has been accused of mass murder and rape throughout the war. Especially in El Geneina, capital of Western Darfur, where between 10,000 and 15,000 people died last year in killings targeting ethnic groups, according to a United Nations panel of experts.
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“The number of people from groups they have targeted to kill is five times greater than that of El Geneina here, if not greater. And then they will have a question about the mode of murder. Will they waste bullets? How will they do it? Raimundo says.
“The job for me and my team is to position ourselves to move from warning, when the warning phase ends, to documentation, to capture evidence for future accountability.”
The conflict that 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 called Tagaldeen said in a press conference on Thursday that the city faces a shortage of drinking water in the coming days, due to a lack of fuel for generators.
“There are many families here that depend on just one meal a day. The RSF that surrounds El Fasher threatens citizens with death: hunger and thirst,” said Tagaldeen.
“We call on the international community to urgently intervene to save the citizens of Darfur, and especially El Fasher.”
This week the UN and the United States highlighted their concern about the situation in El Fasher.
UN officials last week warned the UN Security Council that around 800,000 people in El Fasher were in “extreme and immediate danger”.
Two decades ago, Hollywood actor George Clooney was among those who brought international attention to the ethnically motivated mass killings in Darfur.
The UN and the African Union established a peacekeeping presence in the region in 2007 until their mandate ended in 2020.
Raymond says ending that mission has contributed to what is now happening in Darfur.
“Darfur is about to succumb to the FAR. And there’s no chanting, there’s no bracelet, there’s no celebrity in the Today is the show. “There’s just the human reality of what’s about to happen, and it’s happening in the dark and in silence,” Raymond said.
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