标签： Africa

One year after Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary fighters captured the key Darfur city of el-Fasher following a months-long brutal siege, a new BBC investigation has uncovered overwhelming evidence of a coordinated campaign to eliminate the city’s entire healthcare network — a violation of international humanitarian law that the United Nations’ top human rights official says may constitute war crimes.

Sudan’s devastating civil war erupted in April 2023 when tensions between the national Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF boiled over into open conflict. While both sides have faced accusations of targeting medical infrastructure, the destruction in el-Fasher stands out as one of the clearest and most severe examples of healthcare collapse amid the ongoing crisis, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Drawing on firsthand testimony from on-the-ground medical workers who survived the siege, the investigation documents at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and medical sites across el-Fasher between May 2024 and October 2025, with some facilities hit multiple times. Between the start of the war and the RSF’s final takeover of the city, the investigation recorded 55 medical workers killed, 120 injured, and 10 more forcibly abducted or disappeared.

Dr. Muhamed Suliman, a surgeon who remained in el-Fasher through the siege, told the BBC the campaign against healthcare was deliberate and strategic. “The RSF [were] trying to evacuate the hospitals, to put them out of service because the health system is the cornerstone of any city or any state,” he explained. “The RSF started hitting these areas so citizens have no longer any way to stay there. It was intense. It was deliberate. It was planned.”

The collapse of el-Fasher’s healthcare system unfolded gradually as the conflict dragged on. Within weeks of the war’s start in 2023, one of the city’s largest core facilities, the Teaching Hospital located near central SAF positions, was forced to shut down, relocating all operations to the city’s South Hospital. For months, South Hospital continued operating, but service was increasingly disrupted by widespread power outages and rapidly dwindling medical supplies. The situation deteriorated dramatically when the RSF launched its full siege of el-Fasher in May 2024, and South Hospital came under repeated shelling as RSF fighters advanced from the city’s eastern outskirts.

On June 8, 2024, RSF fighters raided South Hospital in an attack that still haunts survivors. Dr. Izzeldin Ahmed Dawaud Asow, the hospital’s director general, was confronted by paramilitaries outside his office who targeted him with ethnic slurs, using a derogatory term that labels non-Arab Sudanese as foreigners. He was beaten unconscious with rifle butts and only survived by playing dead. “They put their hand on my chest, and I stopped breathing. And they said: ‘Leave him, leave him. The rubbish has died. Leave him.’ They left me,” he recalled. After the attack, the hospital shut down and later fell under RSF control when SAF forces retreated.

Dr. Alaa Eldin Nugud, a Sudanese surgeon who now serves as health minister in the RSF-backed civilian administration, has defended the group’s actions, claiming South Hospital was being used as a military base with missile launchers positioned on its grounds. He shared a video of weapon remains filmed more than a year after the hospital closed to support his claim, and also released purported maps of landmines planted by SAF around the adjacent Teaching Hospital. However, the BBC found no independent evidence to verify these allegations, and local Darfur government officials have categorically rejected the claims. El-Fasher doctors also confirmed the hospital was never integrated into the nearby military base and that staff continued to access the facility to retrieve supplies throughout the conflict.

After South Hospital closed, remaining staff and equipment moved to the Saudi Maternity Hospital in western el-Fasher, near the main SAF stronghold. It did not take long for attacks on the new last remaining major medical facility to ramp up. Six doctors who spoke to the BBC independently described a clear pattern of systematic targeting, with the Saudi Hospital hit repeatedly — sometimes as many as 25 times in a single day — by a mix of artillery shelling and precision-guided drone strikes. Smaller clinics and specialized facilities fared no better: when medical sites relocated to escape attack, their new locations were also targeted. The Specialised Children’s Hospital, which closed early in the war, was forced to shut down twice more after moving to two alternate sites, both of which were shelled. The city’s main dialysis center was also struck, then attacked again after relocating.

As attacks intensified, medical workers improvised desperate measures to keep care running. They built sandbag barricades around the Saudi Hospital, converted steel containers into underground operating bunkers, and set up a network of secret alternative patient wards and surgical sites to reduce the risk of mass casualties from strikes. Even in these conditions, life-saving care continued: on the day the Saudi Hospital was hit by bombing, medical staff conducted an emergency C-section using only light from their mobile phones.

Dr. Asow, who continued operating through the siege, shared harrowing accounts of close calls and deliberate targeting. On one occasion, he ordered an operating theater deep cleaned before a procedure, forcing the patient to be moved to an alternate site just hours before the room was destroyed by a shell — a twist that led his staff to nickname him “Mr. Deep Cleaning.” On another occasion, he was mid-surgery on a patient’s neck when an explosion shook the building; all other staff fled, but he stayed to complete the procedure. He also described drones systematically tracking patient movements: in March 2025, a drone followed a group of people carrying injured patients to a temporary ward and struck at the hospital gate, killing nine. Five months later, a drone hit a donkey cart transferring patients — all ambulances had already been destroyed — killing two patients, the driver, and the donkey.

By the time RSF fighters seized full control of el-Fasher in October 2025, the Saudi Hospital was the only functioning medical facility left in the entire city. The RSF stormed the facility on October 25, with allegations emerging of a massacre that killed more than 460 patients and accompanying civilians. The RSF has denied the massacre took place, but the WHO has condemned the reported killings, and satellite imagery published after the attack showed clusters of bodies on the hospital grounds.

In response to the BBC’s findings, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called the evidence “deeply disturbing,” confirming the findings align with his office’s own monitoring. “Our monitoring and documentation shows the RSF repeatedly struck el-Fasher’s main hospitals and makeshift health facilities, destroying or seriously damaging them and severely impacting access to health services for thousands of civilians trapped in the city,” Türk said. He added that the repeated attacks on civilian healthcare infrastructure amount to serious violations of international humanitarian law and may constitute war crimes.

The RSF has uniformly rejected the BBC’s findings, framing the allegations as political propaganda designed to damage the group’s reputation by SAF and its local allies. Dr. Nugud dismissed the testimonies of el-Fasher doctors as lies, claiming their accounts are skewed by tribal and political loyalties to the SAF. He also claimed the RSF has reopened major facilities including the Saudi Hospital and Teaching Hospital, and that South Hospital will soon reopen, asserting that medical workers who stayed did so voluntarily. But multiple doctors who appeared in RSF government videos claiming they were working voluntarily told the BBC they were forced to participate, with one noting “If I spoke out of line, they’d put a bullet through my head.”

A full year after el-Fasher fell, the trauma of the siege remains raw for survivors. Sudan’s civil war shows no sign of ending, with front lines shifted to other regions but attacks on healthcare continuing across the country as part of a worsening nationwide humanitarian catastrophe. UN investigators have previously noted that the violence in el-Fasher carried all the “hallmarks of genocide”, with RSF forces — built from former Arab militias with a history of ethnic violence in Darfur — systematically targeting non-Arab civilian populations that make up most of the city’s population.

South Africa is once again grappling with deadly anti-migrant violence following the fatal beating of an unidentified foreign national in Durban, an incident that has thrown a harsh spotlight on the country’s decades-long struggle with xenophobic tension and deep-rooted socio-economic inequality.

Local law enforcement confirms the victim, a man thought to be between 38 and 42 years old, was initially accosted by two assailants at a roadside before a crowd of roughly 50 people joined in the assault. He was pronounced dead at the scene of the attack, and investigators have now launched a formal homicide probe, though no definitive motive has been confirmed as of yet.

Provincial police spokesperson Robert Netshiunda told the BBC that authorities are refusing to speculate on potential links to the ongoing wave of anti-immigrant protests sweeping the nation, noting that additional details will be released to the public only after they have been fully verified.

This latest killing comes amid a surge of anti-migrant demonstrations that have rocked South Africa throughout 2024, many of which have escalated into brutal violence. Earlier this June, rioters set fire to local shops and vehicles in both Durban and Soweto, the major township located just outside Johannesburg. One of the most prominent organizations organizing the protests, a group called March and March, had issued an ultimatum requiring all undocumented foreign nationals to leave the country by June 30. Multiple rallies held in the lead-up to that deadline brought widespread reports of targeted assaults on migrants from other African nations.

The escalating violence has triggered urgent action from several neighboring and regional African countries, which have moved to repatriate their citizens out of concern for further attacks. Nigeria held South African authorities directly responsible for the deaths of two Nigerian citizens in June, while Ghana confirmed the killing of 41-year-old Bashiru Isak, a father of three who was fatally shot in Cape Town during anti-migrant demonstrations. Isak’s death sparked a formal diplomatic dispute between the two nations, with South Africa pushing back against claims that the violence was widespread, arguing the scale of unrest had been overstated.

Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, a leading figure in the March and March movement, has pushed back against accusations of xenophobia directed at her group. In an interview with the BBC’s *Focus on Africa* program, she argued that calls for stricter immigration controls do not equal anti-foreigner sentiment. “We can’t be living with these people for so many years and now when we say it is too much, it is enough, we are told that we are xenophobic,” she stated.

South African national government officials have struck a tentative balance in response to the unrest, urging protesters to commit to peaceful demonstration while also acknowledging that long-overdue immigration reform is needed. Authorities note that since launching a national crackdown on undocumented migration earlier this year, tens of thousands of foreign nationals have already been deported or voluntarily repatriated to their home countries.

This latest chapter of violence is not an isolated incident: South Africa has contended with repeated waves of xenophobic attacks for nearly 20 years. The worst outbreak on record occurred in 2008, when widespread coordinated attacks on foreign-born communities left more than 60 people dead and displaced tens of thousands more.

Contemporary anti-migrant sentiment has grown against a persistent backdrop of national crisis: South Africa struggles with widespread systemic poverty, one of the world’s highest levels of income inequality, and an unemployment rate that hovers at roughly 33 percent, leaving one in three working-age South Africans out of a job. Protesters and anti-immigrant activists often claim that migrants take scarce jobs from native-born citizens, drive up local crime rates, and overburden already strained public services. However, academic researchers have repeatedly found that these broad, generalized claims are not supported by empirical evidence.

Even amid its ongoing economic struggles, South Africa remains one of the most popular destinations on the African continent for migrants, who travel to the country in search of formal employment, physical safety, and improved economic opportunity for themselves and their families.

After more than 12 months held captive in Niger, two elderly European women have been released and transferred to Libyan government representatives in the eastern port city of Benghazi. The two hostages, 76-year-old Swiss national Eva Gretzmacher and 69-year-old Austrian national Claudia Abbt, were abducted separately in Agadez, a major city in northern Niger, in two separate incidents that took place in January and April of 2023 respectively.

Public details around the kidnapping and subsequent release remain heavily limited. Authorities have not confirmed the identity of the groups that held the two women, nor have any demands connected to the captivity been made public. Multiple unofficial reports have previously connected the abductions to fighters aligned with the Islamic State militant network, and no information has been shared about the specific conditions that paved the way for the pair’s release.

Footage broadcast by Libya’s local al-Masar TV captured the two women entering a vehicle matching the description of a medical ambulance, before receiving preliminary check-ups and care from a licensed health worker. Speaking through an interpreter in French, the pair publicly expressed gratitude to Khalifa Haftar, the top military commander who controls much of eastern Libya, and his son Saddam Haftar, for overseeing their safe release.

Gretzmacher is no stranger to the region: she worked for years as an international aid worker and built a decades-long life in Niger prior to her kidnapping. Abbt, similarly, had resided and worked as a community outreach worker in Agadez for multiple years before her abduction. According to independent local news outlet Air Info Agadez, a repatriation flight was scheduled to depart Benghazi on Thursday, with an initial stop in Vienna to hand Gretzmacher over to Austrian officials before the aircraft continues to Switzerland to deliver Abbt to her home country’s authorities.

The release comes against a backdrop of long-running instability across both Libya and the broader Sahel region. Libya has been locked in a fragmented political landscape since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising removed longtime authoritarian ruler Muammar Gaddafi from power. The country is currently split between two competing governing authorities: an eastern administration based in Tobruk, which is backed militarily by Haftar’s forces, and a unity government based in the western capital of Tripoli led by Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah.

For its part, the Sahel region that spans across central West Africa, including Niger, has faced a surging wave of jihadist insurgent violence for more than a decade. Militant groups aligned with both al-Qaeda and Islamic State have carried out thousands of deadly attacks and targeted kidnappings of foreign nationals and local residents across the region. Niger itself also entered a new period of political uncertainty in 2023, when General Abdourahmane Tchiani led a military coup that deposed the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, placing the nation under full military rule.