Abubakr Ahmed was ready to die on the soil he had fought so hard to defend from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
For 550 days, he fought as a member of the “popular resistance”, a neighbourhood group formed to help the army and aligned armed groups protect el-Fasher from the RSF, their rival in the two-and-a-half-year civil war.
The besieged city was the last army stronghold in the sprawling region of Darfur, until it fell on October 26.
According to Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army surrendered and negotiated the safe exit of its troops in the hope of stopping a bloodbath.
But their withdrawal left 250,000 people – starving and beleaguered civilians – to face the RSF alone.
Ahmed remembers “shooting” his way out of the city with a handful of young men from his unit. During the final clashes, shrapnel hit Ahmed in the abdomen after a rocket-propelled grenade blew up a car nearby.
He managed to escape, unlike so many others.
“The RSF killed civilians and left their corpses in the streets,” Ahmed, 29, told Al Jazeera after he had escaped el-Fasher.
“They were killed without mercy.”
Mass exodus
In the first three days after capturing el-Fasher, the RSF killed at least 1,500 people, according to the local monitor Sudan’s Doctors’ Network. The figure includes the killings of 460 patients and their companions from the local al-Saud hospital, which has also been verified by the World Health Organization.
Al Jazeera’s own verification unit, Sanad, authenticated several videos that showed RSF troops standing over a pile of dead bodies or executing a row of unarmed young men.
