Over 100 charity workers killed in ongoing Sudan conflict

As the humanitarian crisis in Sudan proceeds, aid workers spoke with journalists from the Associated Press and the Aid Workers Security database, reporting the killing of more than 100 charity kitchen workers, according to Africanews via AP on February 27th. 

Enas Abab, 19, explained that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took her father in el-Fasher after capturing the city in October, demanded ransom and then claimed they killed him when the family could not pay. He had been distributing food and medicine to displaced people.

The RSF has been fighting Sudan’s army since April 2023. It laid siege to el-Fasher before overrunning the city. Reportedly, only 40 percent of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee alive, with thousands wounded and the fate of many others unknown.

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) said on August 28th that el-Fasher had become a “literal kill box,”, reports had emerged that the RSF had erected barriers around the city, effectively trapping residents inside the siege.

Danger in Sudan is not limited to military attacks, as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported on October 18th an estimated 120,000 active cases of cholera in the country. 

Weeks after her father’s disappearance, Abab’s husband also went missing. She later fled to Egypt with her young son.

Farouk Abkar, 60, also from el-Fasher, spent a year distributing grain at a kitchen in Zam Zam camp. He survived drone strikes but said RSF fighters later attacked the kitchen and beat him, knocking out several of his teeth. He left el-Fasher on foot with his daughter, walking for 10 days to safety in Egypt, where he now lives in overcrowded housing and cannot afford medical care.

Across Darfur, famine is spreading and supplies are scarce. Despite the risks, communities continue to set up kitchens to provide a lifeline, yet doing so puts individuals in danger and leaves their families in difficult positions, as ransoms can vary between $2,000 and $5,000.

Africanews via AP, Maghrebi.org