June 10, 2024
Khartoum – Darfur 24
Resident (A.S.) who lives in the Al-Jili neighborhood , North of Bahri city , suffers from illness for days. There is neither a dose of medicine nor a doctor to examine her condition. Her family was able with difficulty to transfer her to the nearest hospital to receive treatment in the city of Shendi, 200 km north of Al-Jili, or in the city of Omdurman. But the woman, who was exhausted by the disease, could not bear the hardship of the road, so her spirit was exhausted. On the eastern bank of the Nile before crossing to the western bank.
Citizen “A.A” says that this situation applies to the majority of patients in this city, which is witnessing an almost complete lack of services and a continuous displacement.
Electricity has remained absent for the sixth month in a row from the Al-Jili area and most of the areas of the northern countryside of Khartoum Bahri locality, which is inhabited by more than About one hundred thousand citizens.
The suffering is most evident in the connection between the water service and electricity. After the latter was interrupted, citizens resorted to operating the water station drawn from the Nile with gasoline, which in turn is subject to repeated waves of outages after the intensification of the fighting around the Al-Jili refinery. To make matters worse, the Nile water receded from the station’s pumps, which led to a water outage for two weeks. Consecutive until the moment of writing this report.
Citizens in Al-Jili, which has been besieged for months, have been resorting to using water from old wells that they were forced to operate even though it is not suitable for drinking. Even this forced solution does not provide water until the citizens dig for a long time along the main water line.
The prices of food commodities arriving from Shendi are witnessing a huge increase, at a time when sources of income have been eroded in an unprecedented manner.
Total isolation
The situation is not the best in the rest of Khartoum, most of which suffer from a complete or almost complete interruption of communications, water and electricity, and the majority in Khartoum uses water that is not suitable for drinking.
The volunteer in the East Nile region said: Ibrahim Saed, who is active in charitable kitchens, said that the prices of goods have become beyond bearable, which has created a deficit in the work of the kitchens. During his talk to “Darfur 24,” Saed expected that the activity of the kitchens would stop after Eid al-Adha if they did not receive significant support.
Charitable kitchens that mimic the “takaya” format continued to cover the needs of Khartoum residents for food and drink, and some groups working in charitable activity complained of a decline in popular support due to the majority’s loss of sources of income with the prolongation of the war.
With the expansion of violations on the island and the escalation of battles in El Fasher, Khartoum became a forgotten area.
The residents of Khartoum suffer from hardship and extreme poverty, and depend entirely on banking applications. With the scarcity of resources, the trade of selling money in cash in exchange for transfers via banking applications has grown, and the interest rate reaches between 10-15%, according to Saed.
Forced marriage and undocumented contracts
An eyewitness in the East Nile told “Darfur 24” that the miserable situation in Khartoum has created a complex social reality. In addition to the “sex trade” for the benefit of the Rapid Support members, cases of forced marriage have emerged, as happened with a citizen of the region who was forced to marry his daughter to one of the Rapid Support members.
With the disruption of official institutions, the wedding ceremony takes place in a normal manner, and the eyewitness, who requested that his name be withheld due to his presence in areas controlled by the Rapid Support, indicates: Until the emergence of what is known as the “consultant,” who acts as the legal official to complete the contract ceremonies, and there are no official papers documenting these contracts.
According to his statement to “Darfur 24,” the advisor could be a mayor or a tribal warden, a former official, an imam of a mosque, or even a governor, who comes to conduct the announcement ceremony.
Some of the marriages that took place; The spouses participating in the battles then disappeared and did not return, as their fate became unknown, and thus the fate of the marriages themselves was unclear, according to the eyewitness.
But the witness came back and said that many marriages take place with complete consent, as the Rapid Support personnel provide traditional dowries and money in double amounts to the families there.
The eastern Nile region has witnessed a widespread deployment of Rapid Support since the first month of the war, before their deployment expanded to reach Al-Ailafon a few months ago.
Luring and plundering
Citizen Haitham Mohamed, who left East Nile more than a month ago, said, “If a citizen’s movements increase between the market and stores, which suggests that he has an abundance of money, then he is vulnerable to looting from the Rapid Support elements.”
Some rapid support elements provide satellite internet devices to citizens to enable them to communicate and receive bank transfers, but the same blessing turns into a tone, as these stores become a trap for revealing what money they hold.”
Haitham said in his interview with “Darfur 24” that the Rapid Support groups left after taking advantage of the war, and some of the remaining groups became active in trade, but he pointed out that the departure of some groups did not affect the size of the deployment in the eastern Nile.
However, the situation in Omdurman seems better than in Khartoum, and the volunteer activist said: Sunda Abdel Wahab told “Darfur 24” that there is a state of normalization and coexistence with the war in Omdurman, and people have regained their movement in the markets and commercial activity, and transportation is operating normally.
Since the first months of the war, the city of Omdurman has turned into a refuge for the majority of the residents of Khartoum and Bahri, and it witnessed waves of returns after the fall of the Gezira state last December.
“With regard to charitable kitchens, we have not faced a scarcity of resources, but rather support is increasing,” Sohinda says.
Suhinda’s activity covers 5,000 families through a central kitchen and sub-kitchens in different areas in Omdurman. Suhinda adds that the Friday kitchen alone consumes 30,000 pieces of bread.
Charity kitchens stopped
In southern Khartoum, the South Belt Emergency Room said in a report on its Facebook page that all charity kitchens have been suspended except for 3 kitchens out of a total of 41 kitchens due to scarcity of resources, and the region suffers from a scarcity of drinking water and drought in some neighborhoods for a period of approximately “4” months, as it relies on The area uses ground wells only as a source of drinking water, and residents obtain water through primitive methods, either by picking it from wells or buying it from sellers, where the value of a barrel is 3.0.