The foreign ministers of Germany, Jordan and the United Kingdom jointly called on Saturday for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Sudan, describing the situation there in stark, apocalyptic terms after a paramilitary force seized the last major city in the East African nation’s Darfur region.
United Nations officials have warned that fighters with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have rampaged through the Darfur city of el-Fasher, reportedly killing more than 450 people in a hospital and carrying out ethnically targeted killings of civilians and sexual assaults. While the RSF have denied killing people at the hospital, those who have escaped el-Fasher, satellite images and videos circulating social media provide glimpses of what appears to be mass slaughter taking place in the city.
At the Manama Dialogue security summit in Bahrain, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper on Saturday spoke in grim words about events in el-Fasher, where a paramilitary force known as the Rapid Support Forces has seized the city.
“Just as a combination of leadership and international cooperation has made progress in Gaza, it is currently badly failing to deal with the humanitarian crisis and the devastating conflict in Sudan, because the reports from Darfur in recent days have truly horrifying atrocities,” Cooper said.
“Mass executions, starvation and the devastating use of rape as a weapon of war, with women and children bearing the brunt of the largest humanitarian crisis in the 21st century. For too long, this terrible conflict has been neglected, while suffering has simply increased.”
She added that “no amount of aid can resolve a crisis of this magnitude until the guns fall silent.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul echoed Cooper’s concern, directly calling out the RSF for its violence in el-Fasher.
“Sudan is is absolutely an apocalyptic situation,” Wadephul said.
Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Sudan has not received “the attention it deserves. A humanitarian crisis of inhumane proportions has taken place there.”
“We’ve got to stop that,” he added.
Bahrain’s government late on Wednesday rescinded an accreditation for The Associated Press to cover the summit, after a “post-approval review” of that permission. The government did not elaborate on why the visa was revoked. Earlier that day, the AP published a story on long-detained activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja beginning an “open-ended” hunger strike in Bahrain over his internationally criticized imprisonment.
Al-Khawaja halted his hunger strike late on Friday after receiving letters from the European Union and Denmark regarding his case, his daughter Maryam al-Khawaja said.
