Sudanese Seek Refuge Underground in Besieged Darfur City

Desperate for safety from bombardment of Sudan's besieged city of El-Fasher, Darfur, residents have built makeshift bunkers. Muammar Ibrahim / AFP
Desperate for safety from bombardment of Sudan's besieged city of El-Fasher, Darfur, residents have built makeshift bunkers. Muammar Ibrahim / AFP
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Sudanese Seek Refuge Underground in Besieged Darfur City

Desperate for safety from bombardment of Sudan's besieged city of El-Fasher, Darfur, residents have built makeshift bunkers. Muammar Ibrahim / AFP
Desperate for safety from bombardment of Sudan's besieged city of El-Fasher, Darfur, residents have built makeshift bunkers. Muammar Ibrahim / AFP

Beneath the broken earth of the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher in the western region of Darfur, Nafisa Malik clutches her five children close.
As shells rain down, the 45-year-old mother tries to shield them in a cramped hole barely big enough to crouch in.
"Time slows down here," Malik said, from her home near El-Fasher's Hajer Gadou market.
"We sit in the darkness, listening, trying to guess when it's over," she told AFP by phone.
For almost two years the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan's army have waged a war that has killed tens of thousands, AFP said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called it a "crisis of staggering scale and brutality".
El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, is the only major city in Darfur still under army control, making it a strategic prize.
The RSF has tried for months to seize it.
Malik's crude shelter, held up by splintered wooden planks and scraps of rusted metal, is one of thousands in the war-battered city, according to residents.
The army regained much of the capital Khartoum this year, but the RSF has intensified its attacks on El-Fasher.
Desperate for safety from artillery and drone strikes, residents have built makeshift bunkers.
Some are hurriedly excavated foxholes, others are more solid and reinforced with sandbags.
Mohammed Ibrahim, 54, once believed hiding under beds would be enough, "until houses were hit".
"We lost neighbors," he said by phone. "The children were terrified."
Determined to protect his family, Ibrahim dug a hole in his yard. He covered it with sacks of soil with only a narrow entrance.
Doctors underground
Despite the RSF's siege cutting off supply lines, the army and an allied coalition of armed groups known as the Joint Forces still hold most of the city.
Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses satellite and other data to track the conflict, has identified "clusters of damage".
It details destruction from munitions and fires including near the airport, market and in the city's east and south.
The researchers reported bombardment of "residential structures", and said its findings are consistent with Sudanese army air strikes as well as RSF artillery and ground attacks.
Staff at the Saudi Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in the city, carved out an underground shelter last October.
"We use it as an operating room during the strikes, lit only by our phones," one doctor told AFP, requesting anonymity for his safety.
Every explosion sends tremors through the shelter walls, shaking surgical instruments and rattling nerves.
El-Fasher was historically the seat of the Darfur sultanate and has long been a center of power in Darfur.
Now, it is all that stands between total RSF control of Darfur, whose gold resources provide the paramilitaries with vital revenue, according to the United States Treasury Department.
The African Union warned last week that Sudan risks partition.
"The army is well entrenched in El-Fasher, making it exceedingly difficult for the RSF to capture the city," said Marc Lavergne, a Sudan expert at France's University of Tours.
Crucial to the army's war effort in El-Fasher is its support from the Zaghawa ethnic group.
'Existential threat'
Forces from prominent Zaghawa figures, Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi and Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, have joined the city's defense after being neutral at the war's beginning.
"The Zhagawa see the fall of El-Fasher as an existential threat," said Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair.
"They are concerned that the RSF would commit reprisal attacks against them for breaking their neutrality -- if they capture the city," she told AFP.
But as the RSF tightens its grip, the army and its allies face a dilemma: hold the city at immense human cost or risk ceding a stronghold that Khair said could shift the war's balance.
"Holding the city depletes resources," she said. "But losing it would be catastrophic."
A UN-backed assessment declared famine in three displacement camps around El-Fasher. Famine is expected to spread to five more areas, including El-Fasher itself, by May.
Aid is practically nonexistent.
Remaining humanitarian agencies have suspended operations as the RSF attempts to break through, attacking camps and villages around El-Fasher.
"Bringing goods in has become nearly impossible," shop owner Ahmed Suleiman said. "Even if you take the risk, you have to pay bribes at checkpoints, which drives up prices."
Leni Kinzli from the World Food Programme warned of dire consequences.
"If aid continues to be cut off, the fallout will be catastrophic", she said.



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.