'We're here to kill': fears of genocide as paramilitaries take Sudanese city

Images of bodies near a children's hospital bear witness to horror of El Fasher - but few who flee the besieged city reach safety.

- Fred Harter and Isabel Coles report

The survivors wait on the edge of town, scouring the faces of new arrivals in the hope of finding lost relatives. The desert stretching out before them is littered with bodies. They had to walk for days to reach safety, avoiding fighters roving on motorbikes.

"The road is full of dead," said Osman Yousif, speaking from the town of Tawila in Darfur, Sudan's vast western region. "Every few kilometres, you find six, five or four bodies. You have to hide from the fighters. You duck from them in one direction, and then you find them in another."

Yousif escaped from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State, last Sunday, the day it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The city had been under siege for 18 months and hit by famine. Roughly 260,000 people were believed to be sheltering there. But very few made it to the safety of Tawila, 30 miles away.

"They're no where near the numbers we were expecting," said Arjan Hehenkamp, Darfur crisis lead for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). "What is happening to them?"

Aid workers fear vast numbers of weak, malnourished people are hiding in the desert with nothing to eat or drink. Concerns are mounting for those inside El Fasher. Videos circulated online show RSF fighters killing unarmed men on the edge of the city and walking among piles of bodies.

'This is the single most accurately predicted and warned mass atrocity in history'

Nathaniel Raymond, Yale

The UN reported last Wednesday that 460 patients, relatives and medical staff had been killed at Saudi maternity hospital, El Fasher's last functioning health facility. Satellite images studied by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab appear to confirm the account. They show objects nearby "consistent with the dimensions of a human body".