Starving and surrounded: el-Fasher residents plead for aid
Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher, cut off by 19 miles of earthen berms built by rebel forces now attacking the town. Katharine Houreld and her Washington Post colleagues have been speaking with some of those behind the dirt walls. She tells The World’s Marco Werman what she learned.
In this AP file photo, Sudanese displaced people gather at the Zam Zam refugee camp outside the town of El-Fashir in the Darfur region of Sudan, during a visit by UN officials, on July 1, 2004. The UN humanitarian aid and refugee agencies appealed Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024, for $4.1 billion in international support for embattled civilians in Sudan amid signs that some may be dying of starvation after nearly a year of war there between the forces of rival generals.
Karel Prinsloo/AP/File
Desperate barely begins to describe the situation for more than a quarter of a million people in western Sudan. They’re besieged in the city of el-Fasher, where attacking rebels have built miles of earthen berms effectively walling off the city.
That means civilians are unable to leave the city — and food, water and medical supplies are blocked from getting in.
“It’s absolutely horrifying,” Katharine Houreld, bureau chief in Nairobi, Kenya, for the Washington Post, told The World. “They essentially have to choose between staying and starving slowly, potentially getting obliterated in a drone strike or killed when the paramilitary overruns the city or risking trying to escape.”
In this AP file photo, smoke billows after drone strikes by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) targeted the northern port in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, Sudan, May 6, 2025. AP/File
El-Fasher is the last city in western Darfur not controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, the paramilitary group that’s been fighting the Sudanese army since 2023. On Friday, the RSF used a drone to attack a mosque, killing 75 people during morning prayers. And this is just one of the many atrocities being inflicted on the Sudanese people.
“All the roads outside are controlled by the RSF and allied militias, and they are killing, raping [and] holding people for ransom so that families have to pay to get people out, and it’s absolutely terrifying for them,” Houreld said. “It’s a very difficult choice to make because you can die if you stay, and you can die if you go and you have to make the right choice for your family … and nobody knows really what that’s going to be.
Houreld and her colleague Hafiz Haroon have been speaking with residents of el-Fasher about what’s going on there. Houreld spoke to The World’s Marco Werman about the situation for Sudanese civilians in the besieged city.
Editor’s Note: The following interview contains descriptions of the violence.
Marco Werman: Not a single international aid delivery has gotten into el-Fasher since April. Two UN truck convoys have been bombed while trying. What are people actually finding to eat?
Katharine Houreld: They are mostly surviving off of animal feed and wild weeds. The problem is, if the men go out to forage, then they are often killed immediately. And so women and children go out, but then they’re often attacked and raped. So, you have this terrible situation where fathers are overcome with guilt because if they leave, they will probably be killed. But if their families go out, they would be subjected to horrific abuses. So it’s really awful. We spoke to one father who was … so overcome when talking about his 14-year-old daughter’s rape that he had to end the call several times because he was crying so hard.
It’s really horrifying. I mean, and that man, the one that you’re speaking about, he only used his first name because of security reasons. That’s a father whose daughter and niece went out to gather weeds to eat, right?
That’s right. Imagine sending your teenage daughter and niece out to go and get dandelions because you’re so hungry, and this is what they risk. Gang rape … it’s such a stigma in the community that the 14-year-old girl didn’t want to come back and face her family at all. She said she just wanted to die.
The RSF is building a long earthen berm. How is that affecting the fight being put up by the Sudanese National Army inside el-Fasher?
Well, in the last week or so, we’ve seen substantial RSF advances. They’ve closed off almost every route out of the city. It’s very hard to smuggle any food or medicine in there, which is what was happening before. Prices are spiking. We’re seeing drone strikes very close to military positions, and we’re seeing the Joint Forces headquarters was overrun last week. Yale Humanitarian Research Lab has actually put out a flash report saying the city is about to fall.
We have heard reports that some residents have escaped el-Fasher over the wall at night. What happens to them?
So, they then have a long and dangerous journey to either Tawila, a town that’s completely overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of people [who] have basically arrived with nothing. That’s a very, very dangerous route. And we spoke to one man [who] had left the city with 60 people to try to get to Tawilla, and they had been repeatedly attacked. His best friend was whipped to death in front of him. His brother was shot in the head. He prayed with him as he was dying. He himself was injured in the leg and crawled for two days down the road, before he gave up hope. Luckily, some women came by and put him on a donkey and took him in there.
So, citizens in el-Fasher, in fact, all across Sudan are under siege. What are they doing, though, to kind of counter any of this violence?
Amid the great stories of suffering are amazing stories of heroism. From the emergency response rooms, which are civilian-run volunteer groups, often run by former pro-democracy activists, that have sprung up all over Sudan. They smuggle medicine across the frontlines [and] deliver food packages to people who can’t leave their homes. Many of them have been arrested and tortured or killed because people accused them of being spies, but they are truly the heroes of this war, and I wish that more people could hear about their work.
Given the deprivation of all kinds of resources in Sudan, how much do those emergency response rooms and the people running them depend on resources coming in from outside the country?
Well, good question. They had been receiving some money from USAID in many cases. In fact, that made up 77% of their funding last year. Earlier this year, that funding stopped overnight. When I was in Khartoum, I met many families whose children had immediately starved to death because that one meal a day was the only thing that was keeping them alive. I met one woman who had watched two children starve to death. One after the other, and just couldn’t do a thing about it. Ten children in her neighborhood had starved to death within a period of weeks after that funding cut.
So much has been said about Sudan being the forgotten war. Attempts at peace, even ceasefires, have come and gone with no success. Where you are in Nairobi, Kenya, what conversations are you hearing about how the dire situation in Sudan might be addressed this week at the UN General Assembly?
Sudan is the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. Twelve million people have fled their homes. It threatens to destabilize the entire Sahel and Horn of Africa, which is already in great turmoil. So, I hope that we will see some pressure on the actors. There was a statement earlier this month from Egypt, America, the Qataris and Saudi Arabia calling for a ceasefire. That’s resulted in nothing at all.
Parts of the interview have been edited for length and clarity.
