Every day, Samira Younis’ five children ask her when their father will come back.
And every day, she must give them the same agonizing answer: She does not know.
It has been weeks since they watched paramilitary soldiers march him away as the family fled their home in the Sudanese city of El Fasher.
Why We Wrote This
Women have faced displacement, hunger, and violence amid Sudan’s civil war. After the fall of El Fasher in Darfur, they must hold their families together even as their world falls apart.
After a siege of more than 500 days, the pivotal city in Darfur fell to that paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in late October, sending at least 89,000 people fleeing.
El Fasher’s fall marks a turning point in Sudan’s two-and-a-half year civil war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces. But the wave of people fleeing El Fasher is more than simply a military or political crisis. It signals the human unraveling of a city, measured in disappeared fathers, traumatized children, and communities fractured in ways that statistics cannot convey.
Women in particular have been handed an impossible task – to keep their families together as everything they know falls to pieces around them.
“We no longer think about losing money, furniture, gold, or cars – all of that can be replaced,” says Ms. Younis, who, like other women in this article, spoke to the Monitor by phone from Sudan. “What we truly lost are lives, loved ones, souls that cannot be replaced.”
The crime of hunger
For 18 months, the RSF surrounded El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur still under Sudanese military control. The RSF bombed the city and the refugee camps on its outskirts, and blocked humanitarian aid. Women’s bodies became a battleground, as RSF soldiers used rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage to assert their control over the beleaguered city.
Meanwhile, hunger descended on El Fasher, forcing many to survive on animal feed and leaves. Famine was declared in Zamzam, a camp near the city, in August 2024. By last month, it had spread to the city itself; three children were dying of starvation each day, according to the Sudan Doctors Network.
Awedhiya Khames was desperate that hers not be among them. So one day in mid-October, she and five other women slipped out of Dar Al-Arqam, the displacement shelter where they lived. They headed to a nearby village whose residents sometimes gave them food.
But on their way home, RSF soldiers arrested the women, accusing them of carrying supplies to the Sudanese military, Ms. Khames says. The evidence against them: 7 kilograms (about 15 pounds) of sugar, 10 kilograms of cornmeal, and 3 kilograms of rice.
For 10 days, Ms. Khames says, soldiers held the women in Tabit, a city 48 kilometers (30 miles) from El Fasher.
“Every day felt like a year,” she says.
Then, on Oct. 26, the RSF ousted the final remaining Sudanese military troops from El Fasher, securing the city. The guards watching over the six women deserted their post to search for the spoils of victory, and suddenly, the women were free.
Several days later, Ms. Khames found her husband and her three children in Dabbat Nayra, a camp for people who are displaced, in the nearby city of Tawila. But the trauma remains etched in her mind. “We only committed the crime of looking for food to keep our children alive,” she says quietly.
Layers of loss
Tawila, a city 48 kilometers from El Fasher, was already sheltering more than 600,000 displaced people. But it has absorbed tens of thousands more fleeing El Fasher in recent weeks.
Zamzam Idris and her family were among them.
To escape the siege, she and her children trekked for three days on foot with 59 other families. Among them were sick and older people.
“Some collapsed along the way, and we couldn’t carry them,” Ms. Idris says. “So we left them behind and kept going.”
Since Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023, some 14 million people have been displaced – 1 in every 4 people in the country.
For Ms. Idris, fleeing to Tawila was the latest chapter of a story layered with loss. She and her family fled to El Fasher from their home in Korma, 80 kilometers west, in 2015. Then, after war broke out in 2023, her husband left for Libya, planning to make the perilous crossing to Europe by sea. The family has heard nothing from him since – no word that he arrived safely, no news of his death.
Then, when El Fasher became a war zone last month, the family lost their home there, too.
“We survived the journey [out of the city], but survival alone is not enough,” she says from Tawila, where food and water are in desperately short supply. Compounding the problem, the majority of those arriving from El Fasher are malnourished, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which calls it the “most severe [hunger] situation” in Sudan since the start of the war.
“We need to live with dignity,” Ms. Idris says.
A fragile hope
Meanwhile, Ms. Younis’ children are still asking about their father.
In late October, as the RSF breached El Fasher’s city walls, the family fled on foot in the direction of her husband’s hometown of Korma. The older children – Rania, Rani, Ryan, and Rami – walked, while baby Rayan was strapped tightly to her mother’s back.
The next day, RSF soldiers detained Ms. Younis’ husband, Abdel Majid Hasab Allah, along with dozens of other men. Initially, she thought they would hold him just for a few hours; or perhaps she could buy his freedom. Throughout the war, the RSF has kidnapped civilians – particularly those from non-Arab ethnic groups – to both intimidate communities and finance its military operations through ransom payments.
But hours turned to days, days to weeks, and no one contacted Ms. Younis or her husband’s family asking for a ransom. She says he was last seen by other detainees being transported to a bus station east of El Fasher, known as a location where RSF troops carry out both ransom negotiations and executions.
Now, Ms. Younis waits with her children at a displacement camp in Korma – exhausted, grieving, and uncertain whether her husband is still alive.
“Whenever I hear about murdered prisoners held by the RSF, I pray to God to protect my husband,” she says.
And as long as there is no news, she will continue to hold out hope that one day they will all be together again.
