Residents step up aid efforts in El Fasher

PORTSUDAN: For week, eight-year-old Mohamed has suffered the pain of shrapnel stuck in his arm.

- 

But he is one of the lucky ones in Sudan’s western city El Fasher, which is under paramilitary attack.

“One of our neighbours used to be a nurse. She helped us stop the bleeding,” Mohamed’s father, Issa Said, 27, said via satellite connection under a total communications blackout.

“But the arm is swollen and he can’t sleep at night from the pain.”

Said cannot get to a hospital for emergency care. With only the most meagre supplies remaining in El-Fasher, his family is among those whose only medical help has come from neighbours and family members who improved.

The RSF hospital is the only partially functioning one now, according to a medical source there, and even that has come under repeated attack.