The gunmen arrived at dawn on motorcycles, horses and cars. Hours later, they fired at houses, rampaged through shops and destroyed clinics, witnesses said, in a frenzied attack that turned life upside down in El Geneina, a town in Sudan’s Darfur region.
The violence in mid-May, that killed at least 280 people in two days, arrived just hours after two military factions battled for control of Sudan signed a contract to protect civilians and facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid.
Have ceasefire agreements failed so far to put an end to the brutal fights which broke out on April 15 between the Sudanese army and its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Peace talks in Saudi Arabia formally suspended last Thursday.
Fighting has decimated many parts of the capital, Khartoum. But the war between the military factions has also spread across the country to the long-suffering western region of Darfur, an area ravaged by genocidal violence for two decades.
The gunmen who poured into El Geneina were supported by the paramilitary forces. According to doctors, aid workers and analysts, they encountered fierce resistance from armed fighters, including some city residents, who had been given weapons by the army.
Amid the fighting, dozens of markets were destroyed, dozens of relief camps burned and health facilities closed. As heavy artillery rained down from the sky, militants went from door to door seeking targets and firing on unarmed civilians. With no food or water amid the 100 degree heat, thousands began to flee the city – only to be killed by snipers, leaving the bodies piled in the street.
“The situation is catastrophic in parts of Darfur,” said Toby Harward, the Darfur coordinator for the United Nations refugee agency that hosts displaced people in neighboring Chad. “The people live in a dystopian nightmare where there is no law and order.”
Communications with West Darfur have been broken for two weeks. But interviews over the past week with two dozen displaced people, humanitarian aid workers, United Nations officials and analysts have revealed that the region is besieged by levels of violence not seen in recent years. More than 370,000 people Darfur have fled according to the International Organization for Migration in the past seven weeks.
Many of the displaced reach border towns such as Adré in Chad, hungry and traumatized, telling harrowing stories of their escape.
Among them is Hamza Abubakar, a 30-year-old who fled the village of Misteri in West Darfur after it was attacked at dawn in late May by Arab militants backed by the Rapid Support Forces. As people fled their homes, he said, the militants, wielding AK-47s and other weapons, pursued them on horses, camels and in cars. Mr. Abubakar had a gunshot wound to his left arm and was recovering in a clinic.
“They had no reason to kill us,” Abubakar said in a telephone interview. Although his wife and 1-year-old daughter survived, he said, his brother and sister had died in the street from their injuries.
“Many others couldn’t make the trip,” he said.
For years the government of the former dictator Omar Hassan al Bashir carried out a campaign of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing in Darfur that has killed as many as 300,000 people since 2003.
The two generals are now fighting for power in Sudan – General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the army and Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan of the paramilitary forces – were among those who perpetrated these atrocities, eventually leading to an indictment against Mr. al-Bashir at the International Criminal Court.
Fighting in the region has also increased sharply in recent years UN peacekeepers left and mercenaries and rebel fighters poured through porous borders with neighboring Libya and Chad. African farmers and nomadic Arabian herders – sometimes supported by General Hamdan’s men – also clashed over dwindling resources and land.
In the weeks before the war startedtensions in Darfur were already rising.
In several cities across the region, community leaders, aid workers and observers reported a weapons buildup and increased recruitment campaigns by both the military and paramilitary forces. General Hamdan, whose troops are mainly recruited from Arab tribes, also began to enlist soldiers from African tribes in an effort to win their favor and bolster his power in the region.
When fighting began in Khartoum in April, so did the rival forces fighting started in Darfurleading to massacres of civilians, looting of food depots and attacks on aid workers.
But community leaders, civil society organizations and some regional political leaders quickly negotiated a ceasefire that ended fighting in parts of Darfur. A ceasefire in eastern Darfur has largely been maintained, observers said, even as insecurity remains due to attacks by bandits.
That opened up a slim window of opportunity that allowed UN personnel and international humanitarian workers across Darfur to be evacuated by road and air to Chad and South Sudan in late April.
But shortly after the evacuations, the region again descended into chaos.
The two sides began clashing over control of key installations, including the airport and military bases in towns such as El Fasher in North Darfur and Zalingei in Central Darfur. Clashes and bank looting erupted in the South Darfur town of Nyala after paramilitary members failed to collect their salaries because General al-Burhan froze their accounts and assets, aid workers and analysts said.
Arab militants, supported by the paramilitary forces, also mobilized and advanced towards El Geneina, where the army was already arming members of ethnic African tribes to defend themselves.
“El Geneina is one of the worst places on earth right now,” said Fleur Pialoux, MSF project coordinator in El Geneina, who evacuated the city at the end of April.
Before the conflict, her team was racing to fight a wave of malaria and malnutrition in Darfur ahead of the rainy season in June.
But as bullets riddled her staff’s grounds, Ms Pialoux, 30, knew she had to get her workers out. After four days in a safe room, scouring social media apps for news of a ceasefire, she learned of a brief ceasefire that allowed bodies to be collected from the streets. As she and her staff fled the city, Ms. Pialoux recalled speeding past scorched refugee camps, a looted market, and devastated roads.
The warring factions in Darfur, she said, “will stop at nothing until they run out of ammunition or bodies to kill.”
With the failure of ceasefire talks in Saudi Arabia and the call to arms issued by Darfur Governor Mini Arko Minawi, the region could be dragged into more brutal and protracted warfare.
Aid workers cannot obtain visas to enter Sudan or find safe routes to deliver food by road. Prices of food, water and fuel have skyrocketed and many people have no access to cash.
On Monday, the army was accused by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo of bombing a university in Khartoum on Sunday. killing 10 Congolese civilians. An army spokesman did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
In El Geneina, a Sudanese doctor who had been sheltering with a colleague at a medical boarding house in late April said armed gunmen beat and robbed them before they were dumped on the street.
“The roads were filled with the smell of death and gunshots,” said the doctor, 30, who asked to be called by his nickname Yousef for safety reasons. “Bodies lay decomposing in the street, covered in bullet wounds.”
He and his colleague lived on the run for the next month, he said, dodging gunfire and itinerant militia on motorcycles to reach a series of temporary shelters: a mosque, an abandoned clinic, a scorched market.
“The city was flooded with all kinds of weapons. I have never seen anything like it,” said the doctor, who had worked in El Geneina for four years. He said he witnessed gunmen kill residents indiscriminately, and when armed groups began going door-to-door and killing residents in late May, he and his colleague fled.
According to Mona Ahmed, a women’s rights activist who fled the city last month, at least a dozen women have been raped in El Geneina. Ms. Ahmed said the true number of rape victims is most likely higher.
“There is no protection for them, no medical or social support,” said Ms. Ahmed, 27 years old. “Terror thrives in such an environment that is cut off from the rest of the world.”
Eliane Peltier contributed reporting from Chad.