As of Monday, more than 100,000 people were estimated to have been driven from al-Fashir and adjacent villages since October 26, according to an update from the UN refugee agency IOM.
Of these, just over 10,000 have reached the vast and growing refugee camp in Tawila just to the west, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which is receiving them.
“Searching for relatives”
Currently, thousands of fleeing Sudanese families are arriving there every day, the aid organization announced in a press release. The other tens of thousands of refugees have not yet been counted. Many of them are believed to still have difficulty getting west from the area around al-Fashir.
"Many are searching for the tens of thousands of relatives who are missing, after they were separated in the chaos," NRC writes in the dispatch.
Armed forces from the organization RSF entered al-Fashir and took control from loyalist forces on October 26, after a year and a half of siege that had taken a toll on the city's population. There were early reports of executions of civilians, ethnic cleansing, rapes and, among other things, a massacre at a hospital in which several hundred people were killed.
At first, there was also great concern among aid organizations on the ground, as surprisingly few people fled al-Fashir – a city that previously had around 200,000 inhabitants – and came to Tawila. A large proportion were children who came alone.
Many in a small space
Originally a small town, Tawila is located in a small area governed by an armed force that has been able to remain neutral in the raging civil war and is therefore a relatively safe place. Hundreds of thousands of people had already fled there earlier this year, when fighting reached the huge Zamzam refugee camp just south of al-Fashir.
The new camp in Tawila stretches through the desert like a large and temporary city, NRC's operations manager Noah Taylor, who has recently been there, announces in their press release. He warns that it will soon be impossible to meet the most basic needs of the refugees there.
