Kampala — "There is a particular cruelty to safety when your family is dying."
I write this from Kampala, some 2,000 kilometres from my home in the Sudanese city of El Fasher, which has just fallen to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after an 18-month siege. From exile, I try to piece together what happened through messages, photos, and the broken voices of those who escaped.
On Sunday, 26 October, I woke up at 5am to the sound of rain drumming against my window. The sky was heavy with clouds. After dawn prayer, I opened WhatsApp, scrolling through the family group chats the way I do every morning - checking for updates from those still trapped in El Fasher, one of the biggest cities in Darfur.
The first message that day was from my cousin, Ahmed, known to us as "Adrub". It was just a few lines: "El Fasher is under unprecedented attack. Pray for us."
Follow us on WhatsApp | LinkedIn for the latest headlines
I thought it was just another RSF attack, one of the hundreds they had launched on the city over the past year and a half. But a little while later, the group announced it had taken control of the headquarters of the national army in El Fasher, and that the city was theirs.
I went back to the family WhatsApp group to check for updates. Nothing. Complete silence from everyone inside El Fasher. No contact. No messages.
At 4pm, my uncle, Abdulaziz, then shared a photo. It showed Adrub - the same cousin who had sent that morning message asking for prayers. In the photo, he was dead.
I asked everyone to wait. "Let's verify first," I said. I took the photo's details and ran them through verification apps. The image was real. Unaltered. It had been taken in El Fasher that same day.
That Sunday stretched on endlessly. There was no communication with anyone inside the city - only the photos and videos posted by RSF fighters themselves, documenting their violations, celebrating their control of the city.
Meanwhile, I heard church bells ringing around my house. Then hymns followed, drifting through my windows - sounds of peace and safety that felt profoundly undeserved.
Phone calls poured in from around the world. People were asking what was happening in El Fasher, what was happening to their families there. They believed that, as a journalist, I might know more than they did.
But I had no answers. Even the military commanders on both sides - some of whom I have contacts with - had nothing concrete to say; only contradictory narratives. The army and allied armed movement leaders would not acknowledge their withdrawal from the city, while the RSF claimed total control.
Later, it became clear that most of the army and armed movement leaders had indeed withdrawn, leaving vast numbers of civilians at the mercy of a militia that would slaughter thousands in the days that followed.
When the stories come through
By Tuesday, 28 October, Kampala, which has a big population of refugees from Darfur, had become one large funeral tent. You did not know who to console. So many families had lost members, not counting the missing who remain unaccounted for to this day.
Yet there is a particular cruelty to safety when your family is dying. I sit right now in my house, where the loudest sound is rain on the roof. Meanwhile, my cousin walks 60 kilometres on swollen feet, seeking safety. My friend gets arrested at an RSF checkpoint, and his brother in Libya scrambles to send ransom money through a banking app.
I know these details because eventually, some people made it out. They arrived in Tawila or Korma or the Daba Naira camp, and slowly their stories filtered back to us.
I receive calls at odd hours: 2am or 4am, when someone makes it to a place with network coverage. Their voices sound hollow, and distant like they are calling from underwater. They made it out, they say. And then, if you ask, they tell you what happened.
Let me tell you about one of the stories that came through, days after the city fell, when my cousin Aisha finally made it to Tawila - a hub for displaced people from El Fasher and surrounding camps - and found network coverage.
Aisha said she left El Fasher at 9pm on the 26th, after the gunfire had subsided. She left her house in complete darkness, and arrived at midnight at the city's northwestern gate, where RSF fighters had set up checkpoints and placed around 20 military vehicles.
There were 13 people in Aisha's group, all women and children except for one 70-year-old man. They were all searched for money and gold, even the children. The women were stripped, and when the soldiers found nothing, they cursed them and forced them to sleep in the open.
On Monday morning, they were allowed to leave. They walked until midday to reach the nearby village of Garni. RSF fighters then searched them again - but they found nothing to take.
On Tuesday, they continued walking toward Tawila. On the road, they received insults, beatings, and provocations from RSF elements. After two days of continuous walking, their feet swollen from exhaustion, they finally arrived on Thursday evening in Tawila, where they underwent medical examinations at a temporary health centre.
In total, Aisha said she walked 60 kilometres with her nine-year-old son, Alaa, both with empty stomachs and exhausted bodies. After months of surviving on animal feed and whatever meals they could get from the volunteer-run soup kitchens in El Fasher, only hope was carrying them forward.
When she told me about it, I could not process it at first. Sixty kilometres. With a nine-year-old. On foot. After already being starved for months.
When Aisha finished telling me this story, I did not know what to say. What do you say? I am glad you are alive? I'm sorry? Neither felt adequate. So I just sat there, phone pressed to my ear, listening to her breathe on the other end of the line, thousands of miles away.
The ransom economy
Others who fled were not as lucky as Aisha. Many have been charged exorbitant ransoms by the RSF and allied militias who kidnapped them as they tried to flee. The sums have broken families' backs and far exceeded their capacity.
Currently, I know of more than 17 members of my extended family who have been detained by the RSF. Ransoms have been demanded for all of them, but only six have relatives that have been able to pay.
The RSF kidnapped my cousin Babiker on 27 October in Garni, after he managed to reach there with his 18-year-old sister, and other civilians.
After exhausting efforts, we managed to collect the 15 million pounds (nearly $20,000) the RSF kidnappers had demanded, and sent it to them via a mobile banking app.
When Babiker finally called after being released on 31 October and reaching Tawila, I could barely recognise his voice. He told me about an old man with a gunshot wound who was arrested with him in Garni. His family was asked to pay a vast ransom that they couldn't afford.
"I watched him get weaker every day," Babiker said. "No food. No water. Just a house surrounded by gunmen. His leg... I can't describe it. And he kept asking about his family. Kept asking if they sent the money."
I asked Babiker if the man made it out.
"I don't know. They separated us. I don't know," he said.
For the other members of my family who are still kidnapped, I talk to their close relatives almost daily now. But what do you say to someone who cannot raise the money? Whose son or daughter or mother is being held, and they cannot do anything about it?
Some of them have stopped sleeping entirely. They just sit with their phones, trying to borrow money from anyone they can think of, adding up numbers that never quite reach the ransom amount, waiting for a call that might be their family member's voice or might be someone telling them it is too late.
Why knowing is the worst part
This is how we live now in the diaspora. We sit in our safe houses in Kampala, Cairo, N'Djamena, and wait for calls. We scramble to send money through banking apps to militias who tell us not to speak to the media, not to post on social platforms.
We sit refreshing WhatsApp obsessively, looking for the blue checkmarks that mean someone's phone still has battery, still has signal, and that the person still exists. We watch the group chats go silent, one by one, not knowing if it is because they fled, because they died, because they were arrested, or because the network is just down.
We have learned to keep our phones charged at all times. We have learned to have money ready. We have learned not to ask too many questions when they call because it makes them angry, and they take it out on our families.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
We lie awake in the early hours of the morning, thinking about all the people we have not heard from and imagining, in vivid detail, what might be happening to them because we have heard what happened to the ones who escaped.
Waiting for news from relatives caught in this situation is torture, but so is actually hearing from someone. You feel your stomach drop because you know they are about to tell you something you will never be able to unhear.
The stories that come through bring more nightmares than closure. Each one is worse than the last. Each one makes you understand, more clearly, what the silence means for everyone else.
The tragedy of El Fasher echoes the RSF-perpetrated genocides in other parts of Darfur, where patterns of identity-based killing and ethnic cleansing repeat amid international helplessness and regional silence.
While urgent calls continue to save civilians, thousands of missing, displaced, and disappeared people remain witnesses to a new tragedy in a war whose end does not seem near.
Before the war, when someone died in our community, we had rituals. Washing the body. Prayers. Burial. Three days of mourning. Now, we do not even have that. We have photos posted by fighters celebrating over corpses.
And I remain here, 2,000 kilometres away, waiting for news that I'm terrified to receive. Answering calls from people who escaped, listening to their stories, adding them to the collection of horrors I carry. Knowing that for every person who tells me what happened, there are dozens more whose stories I will never hear.
The not knowing was torture. But sometimes, I am learning that knowing is even worse.
This article is published in collaboration with Egab. Edited by Muhhamed Kotb and Philip Kleinfeld.
Eisa Dafallah, Sudanese journalist published in local and international outlets, whose coverage is mostly focused on Darfur
