‘Losing hope’: Sudan civilians terrified as RSF attacks second-biggest city

The RSF is on the verge of capturing Wad Madani, a city that has hosted hundreds of thousands of war-displaced people.

On December 15, Sudanese civilians woke up to sounds of gunfire and explosions in Wad Madani, a city under army control that hosts hundreds of thousands of displaced people from the capital Khartoum and nearby towns.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had attacked the city, raising fear that the group would loot homes, kill men and rape women if they captured it.

“They rape [women] to break the spirits of men,” Omonia Kheir*, a Sudanese woman from Wad Madani, told Al Jazeera. “That’s why people here are not scared of dying or getting shot, because then you die as a martyr. But everyone is scared of [women in their families] getting raped.”

After eight months of war, the RSF is on the verge of capturing Wad Madani, the second-largest city in the country’s heartland, in what will mark a major turn in the conflict. Just last week, RSF leader Mohamad Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo agreed to meet top army general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan later this month under the auspices of the East African bloc IGAD.

But even as RSF commanders call for an end to the war with foreign leaders, their fighters are instigating a new humanitarian catastrophe on the ground.