This article contains details some readers may find distressing.
Sudanese Australian Abdullah Gaka has said he hasn’t been able to separate from his phone.
Just three days ago, he received a call through a social media account belonging to his cousin in the fallen city of Al-Fasher. But the voices on the other end weren’t familiar ones — they were of armed men.
“We are the ones who have your cousins,” Gaka recalls one of the men saying.
“If you don’t pay the ransom by tomorrow, Tuesday, you will never see them again,” he said, demanding a ransom equivalent to $127,000 within a 24-hour period.
Gaka, who lives in Canberra, said he pleaded with the kidnappers to let him speak to his cousins. When they finally did, he could hear terror in their voices.
Abdullah Gaka said he isn’t holding out for international condemnation — only for news of his cousins. Source: SBS News
“They couldn’t even speak clearly,” Gaka told SBS Arabic.
“Their voices were extremely frightening and deeply worrying.”
The call ended abruptly. Since then, there has been silence.
Now, Gaka and his wife spend sleepless nights staring at their phones — their only possible link to family trapped in Al-Fasher.
“We can’t eat the food in the fridge,” his wife, Aziza Mohammed, said.
“We keep watching the phone even at midnight to see if they’re online on Messenger or WhatsApp.”
‘Suffering in silence’
Like Gaka, Duha Mohammed opens her phone each morning, bracing for the worst.
With communications from her hometown, Al-Fasher, almost completely cut off, the only way she can learn the fate of her family is by scouring lists of the dead and watching “horrific videos” on social media.
Some are posted by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which appear to show fighters boasting of killings.
“I try to see if as I look through the men, the women, the kids, if I’ll recognise a familiar face, if I’ll see one of my neighbours, one of my cousins, one of my uncles, one of my aunts,” she told SBS Arabic.
“All of the people in Al-Fasher are currently suffering, and they’re suffering in silence.”
Duha Mohammed fears she might learn the fate of her family in Al-Fasher by scouring lists of the dead. Source: SBS News
She arrived in Australia as a refugee two years ago, seeking a new life. But she said the war has followed her through her phone screen.
“It’s something that has been witnessed previously in 2003,” she said, speaking of the conflict in Darfur between the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement rebel groups,” she said.
“We were all expecting what was going to happen this time, but it was still not enough to prepare us for what happened.”
The fall of Al-Fasher
Al-Fasher, the last major city in Sudan’s western Darfur region to fall to the RSF, has become what the United Nations has described as an “epicentre of suffering”.
The UN Security Council on Thursday condemned the RSF’s assault on Al-Fasher following an emergency session on the situation, expressing grave concern in a statement “at the heightened risk of large-scale atrocities, including ethnically motivated atrocities”.
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said the besieged city — already enduring “catastrophic levels of human suffering” — had now “descended into an even darker hell”.
He said there were “credible reports of widespread executions after RSF fighters entered the city”.
“We cannot hear the screams,” Fletcher said on Thursday.
“But the horror is continuing. Women and girls are being raped, people are being mutilated and killed with utter impunity.”
Al-Fasher’s last functioning hospital has been overrun, and doctors have been unreachable. Sudanese official, as well as doctors and activists, have blamed the RSF.
The RSF dismissed the reports as disinformation, saying in a statement that all Al-Fasher’s hospitals had instead been abandoned.
More than 36,000 people have fled Al-Fasher since Sunday, according to the International Organization for Migration, but little is known about the fate of the more than 200,000 others thought to have remained there during an 18-month RSF assault and siege of the city.
Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 after a violent power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Human rights organisations have accused both Sudan’s army and the RSF of war crimes — allegations both sides deny.
More than 150,000 people have been killed in the conflict across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the UN has declared the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
‘We are urging the government to help us’
Gaka said he isn’t holding out for international condemnation — only to the slim hope that news of his cousins’ safety will come.
“We are urging the Australian government to help us find solutions so we can evacuate them from Sudan, so that they can stay somewhere safe,” he said.
Duha Mohammed, too, is urging the Australian government to ensure civilians are not forgotten.
“The siege in Al-Fasher has been ongoing for more than 550 days,” she said.
“They’ve been starved. No food, no medical aid, any form of medical supplies goes into the city and no civilian is allowed to leave.”
Rights groups have warned the scale of devastation in Al-Fasher — once home to more than half a million people — is catastrophic.
Satellite analysis from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab shows door-to-door killings, mass graves, and bodies scattered along the city’s outskirts.
Reddish patches seen in the sand represent what analysts believe could be blood stains.
‘They need their voices to be heard’
From her home in Canberra, Duha Mohammed said she will not stop speaking about the suffering of her people.
“They need help. They need aid. They need support,” Mohammed said.
“They need someone to talk about them. They need someone to listen. They need to know that we are not silent about what they’re going through.”
As for Gaka, he said he checks his phone every few minutes — just in case the line rings again.
— This story was produced in collaboration with SBS Arabic and contains additional reporting by the Reuters news agency.
