Ibrahim Mohamed turned in his hospital bed to find the patient next to him had died, but fighting that had erupted in Sudan’s capital hours earlier meant the body could not be moved.
Battles since April 15 between the forces of two rival generals have turned Khartoum into a war zone, shuttering hospitals and preventing health professionals from providing care.
By the time Mohamed, a 25-year-old leukemia patient, was finally evacuated from the Khartoum Teaching Hospital on Tuesday last week, the body was still there.
Photo: Reuters
“Because of the intense fighting, the person could not be moved and buried,” said Mohamed’s father, Mohamed Ibrahim, 62.
Attiya Abdullah, general secretary of the Sudanese doctors’ union, said the same was happening in other hospitals.
“Decomposing dead bodies are kept in wards” for lack of anywhere else to put them, Abdullah said.
With explosions, heavy gunfire and airstrikes that have killed hundreds in the capital and in other parts of the nation, “morgues are packed and the streets are littered with bodies,” he said.
Urban warfare between forces loyal to Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy-turned-rival, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the commander of the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has triggered a “complete and total collapse of the healthcare system,” he added.
As Ibrahim waited with his son in the hospital ward under ceaseless blasts, “the stench filled the room,” the father said, made worse by power outages in the baking heat.
“We could either stay in the pungent room, or go outside and be met with gunfire,” he said.
At about 1pm on Tuesday last week, after three days with no food, water or electricity, the father and his son finally left, but not to safety.
“The hospital was being shelled,” Ibrahim said.
The doctors’ union said that 13 hospitals nationwide had been shelled and 19 others evacuated since fighting began.
At least eight people have died in attacks on health facilities, the WHO reported.
“The RSF and the army were fighting right outside the hospital,” Ibrahim said, adding that some of those evacuating were hit by gunfire themselves.
When the bombs start falling near hospital premises, doctors face a grim choice.
“We find ourselves forced to let patients leave,” Abdullah said. “If they stay, they would be killed.”
Ibrahim managed to shield his sick son from the crossfire, but “had to go on foot” through the streets, dashing from one safe point to another.
It took them five hours to get home “safely, but my son’s health has deteriorated since,” the father said.
With nearly three-quarters of hospitals shuttered and “operational hospitals only providing emergency services,” Abdullah said there was nowhere else Mohamed could go.
“I just want all of this to stop so I can take my son to be treated,” his father said.
Abdullah said that even the hospitals that have remained open, receiving mostly gunshot wounds, “are at risk of closure at any time.”
“They don’t have enough surgical equipment, not enough fuel to run generators, not enough ambulances or blood,” he said.
The WHO said 413 people had been killed and 3,551 wounded in the fighting across Sudan, but the actual death toll is thought to be far higher, with doctors and humanitarian staff unable to reach those in need.
“Some hospitals have had the same team working” for eight days straight, Abdullah said. “Some have only one surgeon. All are extremely exhausted.”
Medics have made daily appeals for a ceasefire to allow humanitarian access to move through, transport the wounded and bury the dead, but brief lulls in the fighting in Khartoum have repeatedly given way to the crackle of gunfire, cutting through the momentary silence, and no truce has taken hold.
As civilians rallied on social media to find any sources of medication for chronically ill relatives, UNICEF has warned power cuts and fuel shortages were putting at risk the cold storage of more than US$40 million of vaccines and insulin.
On Friday last week, as a third ceasefire collapsed, the doctors’ union shared advice on Facebook on how to handle, shroud and bury decomposing bodies.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS