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.
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