Beneath the broken earth of the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher in the western region of Darfur, Nafisa Malik clutches her five children close.As shells rain down, the 45-year-old mother tries to shield them in a cramped hole barely big enough to crouch in.”Time slows down here,” Malik said, from her home near El-Fasher’s Hajer Gadou market.”We sit in the darkness, listening, trying to guess when it’s over,” she told AFP by phone.For almost two years the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan’s army have waged a war that has killed tens of thousands.United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called it a “crisis of staggering scale and brutality”.El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, is the only major city in Darfur still under army control, making it a strategic prize.The RSF has tried for months to seize it.Malik’s crude shelter, held up by splintered wooden planks and scraps of rusted metal, is one of thousands in the war-battered city, according to residents.The army regained much of the capital Khartoum this year, but the RSF has intensified its attacks on El-Fasher.Desperate for safety from artillery and drone strikes, residents have built makeshift bunkers.Some are hurriedly excavated foxholes, others are more solid and reinforced with sandbags.Mohammed Ibrahim, 54, once believed hiding under beds would be enough, “until houses were hit”.”We lost neighbours,” he said by phone. “The children were terrified.”Determined to protect his family, Ibrahim dug a hole in his yard. He covered it with sacks of soil with only a narrow entrance.- Doctors underground -Despite the RSF’s siege cutting off supply lines, the army and an allied coalition of armed groups known as the Joint Forces still hold most of the city.Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses satellite and other data to track the conflict, has identified “clusters of damage”.It details destruction from munitions and fires including near the airport, market and in the city’s east and south.The researchers reported bombardment of “residential structures”, and said its findings are consistent with Sudanese army air strikes as well as RSF artillery and ground attacks.Staff at the Saudi Hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in the city, carved out an underground shelter last October.”We use it as an operating room during the strikes, lit only by our phones,” one doctor told AFP, requesting anonymity for his safety.Every explosion sends tremors through the shelter walls, shaking surgical instruments and rattling nerves.El-Fasher was historically the seat of the Darfur sultanate and has long been a centre of power in Darfur.Now, it is all that stands between total RSF control of Darfur, whose gold resources provide the paramilitaries with vital revenue, according to the United States Treasury Department.The African Union warned last week that Sudan risks partition.”The army is well entrenched in El-Fasher, making it exceedingly difficult for the RSF to capture the city,” said Marc Lavergne, a Sudan expert at France’s University of Tours.Crucial to the army’s war effort in El-Fasher is its support from the Zaghawa, a non-Arab ethnic group.The UN says the Zaghawa are among those targeted by RSF and allied Arab militias, exacting “a horrific toll”.- ‘Existential threat’ -Forces from prominent Zaghawa figures, Darfur Governor Minni Minnawi and Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, have joined the city’s defence after being neutral at the war’s beginning. “The Zhagawa see the fall of El-Fasher as an existential threat,” said Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair.”They are concerned that the RSF would commit reprisal attacks against them for breaking their neutrality — if they capture the city,” she told AFP.But as the RSF tightens its grip, the army and its allies face a dilemma: hold the city at immense human cost or risk ceding a stronghold that Khair said could shift the war’s balance.”Holding the city depletes resources,” she said. “But losing it would be catastrophic.”A UN-backed assessment declared famine in three displacement camps around El-Fasher. Famine is expected to spread to five more areas, including El-Fasher itself, by May.Aid is practically nonexistent.Remaining humanitarian agencies have suspended operations as the RSF attempts to break through, attacking camps and villages around El-Fasher.”Bringing goods in has become nearly impossible,” shop owner Ahmed Suleiman said. “Even if you take the risk, you have to pay bribes at checkpoints, which drives up prices.”Leni Kinzli from the World Food Programme warned of dire consequences.”If aid continues to be cut off, the fallout will be catastrophic”, she said.

The first US strikes against Yemen’s Huthis since President Donald Trump took office in January killed at least 20 people, the rebels said Sunday, as Washington warned Iran to stop backing the group.The Huthis, who have attacked Israel and Red Sea shipping throughout the Gaza war, said children were among those killed by the intense barrage of strikes.An AFP photographer in the rebel-held capital Sanaa heard three explosions and saw plumes of smoke rising from a residential district, and strikes were also reported in Yemen’s northern Saada region, a Huthi stronghold.”Nine civilians were killed and nine others were injured, most of them seriously,” the Huthis’ health and environment ministry said in a statement on their Saba news agency, reporting the strikes on Sanaa.A strike in the Saada region killed at least 10 people and wounded others, according to the Huthi Ansarollah website, condemning what it called “US-British aggression” and Washington’s “criminal brutality”.The US Central Command (CENTCOM), which posted images of fighters taking off from an aircraft carrier and a bomb demolishing a building compound, said “precision strikes” were launched to “defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation”.There was no immediate comment from British authorities.Trump, in a post on social media, vowed to “use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective”, citing the Huthis’ threats against Red Sea shipping.- ‘Escalation with escalation’ -The Huthis vowed that the strikes “will not pass without response”.”Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to confront escalation with escalation,” the rebels’ political bureau said in a statement on the rebel Al-Masirah TV station.Trump also warned Iran that it must “immediately” cut support to the Huthis. The rebels, who have controlled much of Yemen for more than a decade, are part of the “axis of resistance” of pro-Iran groups staunchly opposed to Israel and the United States.They have launched scores of drone and missile attacks at ships passing Yemen in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the Gaza war, claiming solidarity with the Palestinians.The campaign crippled the vital route, which normally carries about 12 percent of world shipping traffic, forcing many companies into a costly detour around southern Africa.The Palestinian group Hamas, grateful for the Huthi support, hit out Saturday at the US strikes, branding them “a stark violation of international law and an assault on the country’s sovereignty and stability”.- ‘Hell will rain down’ – The US has launched several rounds of strikes on Huthi targets, some with British support. After halting their attacks when Gaza’s ceasefire took effect in January, the Huthis announced on Tuesday that they would resume them until Israel lifts its blockade of aid to the shattered Palestinian territory.Trump’s statement did not reference the dispute over Israel, but focused on previous Huthi attacks on merchant shipping.”To all Huthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!” he said.”Do NOT threaten the American People, their President… or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!”Earlier this month, the United States reclassified the Huthi movement as a “foreign terrorist organisation”, banning any US interaction with it.Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the Huthis had “attacked US warships 174 times and commercial vessels 145 times since 2023”.The Huthis captured Sanaa in 2014 and were poised to overrun most of the rest of the country before a Saudi-led coalition intervened.The war has largely been on hold since a 2022 ceasefire, but the promised peace process has stalled in the face of the Huthi attacks on Israel and Israel-linked shipping.burs-pjm/fox