Myriam Laaroussi, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), spoke on the public radio program Here & Now on November 18 from Tawila, Sudan, where MSF teams are treating people who fled mass violence in the city of El Fasher in recent weeks.
A transcript of her remarks, edited for clarity, can be found below, and the audio can be found online here.
What are the health needs of children arriving in Tawila?
In terms of malnutrition, what we see is that mostly all the children under 5 are indeed malnourished, either severely or moderately, but they also suffered from a lack of food when they were inside of El Fasher for a year and a half at least, plus of course, the lack of access to food when they managed to flee El Fasher to the camp of Tawila.
What kinds of injuries are we seeing among people fleeing El Fasher?
When it comes to violence, we're seeing really the worst. I mean, we're seeing people that have been tortured arriving to our hospital. We're seeing people with gunshots, fresh or older gunshots, arriving at our hospital. People are telling us how they've been tortured and indeed having traces of torture all over the body, as well as a lot of cases of sexual violence.
What are MSF patients saying about what’s happening in El Fasher since the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control?
What we hear is really mostly ethnically based killing. This is what they're describing right now. They're describing a real massacre. The testimonies are really, really hard to hear.
Inside of El Fasher, there are about 250,000 people. That's the estimation that we have. But as per today, about 10,000 to 15,000 people arrived [in Tawila since October 27].
So that's also something that we worry about. People are trapped inside of El Fasher. And what I describe is still happening over there, most likely. Humanitarians do not have access to the city, and people don't have safe access to leave the city to go to a safe place.
There are reports of people being forced to eat animal feed, with community kitchens closed and humanitarian aid blocked. What is the hunger situation in El Fasher?
This is correct. Knowing that there has been a siege around El Fasher for a year and a half, this means that people simply do not have access to food. And these are the reports that we're hearing. So this explains also the very high level of malnutrition among the people, including the children, who manage to flee El Fasher right now.
Did your team expect more people to arrive in Tawila seeking help? And what are your fears for those still in El Fasher right now?
We do expect, indeed, to have an influx of people leaving El Fasher the moment the access is safe, which is not the case today. What we expect is to see what we're seeing, but at a higher level, if this is possible. That's for sure.
Now, what is happening inside of El Fasher? At this point, nobody really knows because it's impossible to communicate with anybody who is inside of the city. What we know, we know from the ones who manage to flee. But all the testimonies describe the torture, describe the violence, describe the targeted, ethnically targeted killings.
And we can see them. We can see how traumatized they are. We can see the fear their eyes. And at some point, we can really see the bullet in their bodies.
What are the conditions survivors face in Tawila?
These survivors, they arrive in a city called Tawila. It's a village, but right now, we have up to one million people living here. Most of them, they are already internally displaced people. So they are joining a situation, a population that is already extremely vulnerable, camps that are not ready to welcome them, no latrines, not enough access to water, not enough access to shelter. They're in incredibly bad condition. Now it's getting colder. Now there are no blankets.
So we're really in that situation where the very basics for survival are not there because the funding for this crisis is not enough.
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