A dawn in mid -April, the same air in the Zamzam camp seemed to break.
The Paramilitary Fast Support forces (RSF) broke into the field of displacement in northern Darfur, throwing a brutal three -day assault that killed hundreds of people and left innumerable other scattered, wounded or missing.
The shots resonated through makeshift shelters. The families ran in all directions. Many never did.
On April 13, the RSF claimed to have captured what the “Zamzam Military Base” called. But those who lived there said there was no such thing, that Zamzam was simply where displaced families clung to life.
The acquisition followed five months of suffocating siege. The roads and the aid were blocked, and the survival went randomly.
A shelter became a battlefield
Zamzam, 15 km (9.3 miles) south of El-Fafasher, the capital of the state of northern Darfur, has been a refuge for civilians displaced by Darfur’s conflict since the 2000s.
At that time, the rights groups said that violence was an ethnic cleaning and a possible genocide of “Arab” nomadic militias backed by the State against sedentary communities mainly “non -Arab.”
Around 300,000 people have finished in Zamzam since 2003. The number became well above 500,000 due to the violence that the Western region of Darfur has deployed since the Civil War of Sudan broke out between the RSF and the Sudanese. The RSF and Surananese.
In the last year, Zamzam has transformed from a place of refuge in a murder field.
Help locks, repeated RSF attacks and famine have stripped the food, medicine and basic safety camp.
The Army and its Allied forces managed to repel RSF assault boxes, but the troops soon returned to El-Fafasher, their last strength, leaving the camp exposed once again.
Dr. Ibrahim Abdallah, general director of Health in northern Darfur, told Al Jazeera by telephone that the death toll probably exceeds 500.
“Due to the Sudanese tradition to bury the dead immediately to honor them, it is difficult to follow up,” he said. “And with Zamzam located many kilometers from El-Fafasher, transporting the bodies for documentation is almost impossible.”
Fleeing a nightmare, just to find another
A young woman, who asked to remain in anonymity for her safety, spoke with Al Jazeera from El-Fafasher, to which she, her husband and her two younger brothers fled.
She says that fear has followed them and told Al Jazeera part of the story of how Zamzam came to flee.
In January 2024, she had been living with her husband in Wadi Shadra in northern Darfur with her 15 -year -old brothers, who moved with them after her parents died.
The RSF attacked Wadi Shadra, and the mixed family fled to Zamzam, where they thought they had escaped from the sausage.
But then, just over a year later, another attack.
“It begins at dawn on Friday [April 11]”She said.” A great force broke into the camp from the south, to one of the markets. The fire exploded in all directions as the shots are classified. “
They hid in trenches for a full day without food or water, since a shell criticized his home and another hit a neighbor, killing three children.
Then they ran, fleeing to the nearby town of Saluma.
“But the RSF also followed us there. They included the houses and shouted that we must go to Tawila immediately,” he said.
His donkey had been killed and his destroyed car, so they had no choice but to walk for hours to El-Fafas under a burning sun.
“I lost my aunt and two of his children that day. We still don’t know what happened to his other three children.”
Trapped from his family: Nasr’s story
Nasr, who asked to be identified by a single name, fled from Zalingei, the capital of the center of Darfur, with his family in October 2023 after the RSF fighters took the city. His father, a community leader, had been threatened twice by the late RSF Commander Ali Yakoub.
The family went through Sarf Omra, in Kabkabiya, North Darfur, before arriving in Zamzam on November 22, 2023.
He arrived with his wife, two children, a three -year -old daughter in spirit and a young son for children and a half, as well as his parents and several brothers.
Together, they build a fragile shelter and tried to start. Every morning, Nasr made the round trip of 30 km (18.6 miles) to El-Fafasher to work in the cattle market and bring food home.
Then, in February, the RSF fighters broke into the camp. The roads were closed. The siege adjusts.
Nasr never returned to his family.
His wife, children, older parents and younger brothers remained Beind, trapped in chaos.
“A tree is more valuable in this world than us. We solve all our human value in this world,” said Nasr.
He rejected the RSF claim of a “military base” in Zamzam as a cruel distortion. They remembered how people dug trenches to protect themselves from relentless bombing.
Later he saw a video or men arrested, including his uncle. One of the RSF leaders gave them a clear message: “Join the RSF OA suffers.”
Nasr has spent agonizing days in El-Fafasher, waiting at the edges of the roads, clinging to the hope that someone from Zamzam can bring the message of his family.
He asks for them in whispers, his heavy voice of fear.
Finally, I heard that they had fled to Tawila, but he adds: “Until now, I don’t know if they arrived in Tawila or not.”
‘More than 28 attacks in five months’
Mohamed Khamis, spokesman for the displaced in Zamzam, is now a patient in a hospital in El-Fafasher.
They shot in the duration of the thigh the assault of the RSF.
The camp had suffered more than 28 attacks in five months, he told Al Jazeera, but none coincided with the scale and violence of the latest.
“They broke at dawn with heavy weapons,” he said.
In the first moments of the attack, according to reports, they went to an international aid clinic, and Khamis hastened to verify friends, but never succeeded.
“I was intercepted by a armored RSF vehicle,” he said.
The RSF fighters shot him and left him on the floor to bleed, but the residents rescued him and passed contraband to a safe place.
“Many young people were executed doing the uproar,” he said.
He continued, trying to describe what happened.
It was confirmed that more than 12 women and girls were kidnapped by RSF fighters while they fled. His whereabouts is still unknown, as well as what they can suffer.
There are reports of women and girls who are raped, “no less than 200 cases” according to Khamis, there, you are sure that many more have not reported.
There is no sure shelter
In the minds of the displaced for the second or third time, the idea of security has gone.
The RSF narrative is that it is fighting “military elements” in Zamzam, but testimonies like Nasr and Khamis refute it.
“There was nothing more than people who tried to survive,” Nasr said again, as if the essay finally could end the indifference of the world.
But silence remains.
The survivors are left with ashes, unanswered questions and a single disturbing truth: “We lost our human value in this world.”
