Satellites show a camp covering 500,000 square meters near the town of al-Dabba, as tens of thousands seek shelter.
Several displacement camps have sprung up and are rapidly filling with people who fled the devastated and virtually empty town of el-Fasher in Sudan, which the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over in October in an atrocity-plagued campaign.
A camp has been set up in the small town of Qarni, northwest of el-Fasher, according to satellite images reviewed by Al Jazeera's Sanad agency. Between December 14 and 29, the camp was expanded by 13,000 square meters (140,000 square feet), bringing its total area to about 199,000 square meters (15,550 square yards), according to satellite data.
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An even larger camp for those displaced from el-Fasher has expanded in the northern state of Sudan, about 700 kilometers (435 miles) away. The El-Afadh camp, near the town of al-Dabba, now covers at least 500,000 square meters (0.2 square miles), after growing by 370,000 square meters (0.14 square miles) since November 19, according to satellite data analyzed by Sanad.
The images confirm the influx of tens of thousands of recently displaced people from the latest chapter of Sudan's brutal 32-month war. According to the UN, 107,000 people have been displaced from El-Fasher and its surrounding areas since late October, when the RSF took the city and carried out mass killings, sexual assaults and ethnically motivated arrests, according to survivors.
Nabiha Islam, a doctor who volunteered at al-Dabba camp for several weeks in early December, said resources were scarce as thousands of traumatized refugees arrived during their stay there.
El-Fasher largely “destroyed”
Last week, a team of UN aid workers visited El-Fasher for the first time since taking office and found a virtually deserted town that they said had the makings of a “crime scene.”
“El-Fasher is a ghost of his former self,” said UN aid coordinator Denise Brown. “We don't have enough information yet to determine how many people are left there, but we know that large parts of the city are destroyed.”
He added that conditions in the city are “very precarious,” and some people live without sanitation or water.
The Sudanese war broke out in April 2023 when a power struggle broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF. It has since killed more than 100,000 people and displaced 14 million, including 4.3 million who have fled to neighboring countries. It has also caused famine in several parts of Sudan, a situation the UN has described as the “world's worst humanitarian crisis”.
El-Fasher was the last major stronghold of the government-aligned FAS in the Darfur region before falling into the hands of the RSF, which emerged from the government-backed People's Defense Forces militia, also known as Janjaweed, accused of genocide against non-Arab ethnic groups during the Darfur conflict of the 2000s.
After taking el-Fasher, RSF forces are advancing east toward the Kordofan region, creating an additional 53,000 refugees, according to the UN.
Mohamed Refaat, head of the UN International Organization for Migration mission in Sudan, has warned that if a ceasefire is not reached around Kadugli, a town in South Kordofan that the RSF is besieging, “the scale of violence we saw in el-Fasher could be repeated.”
