Stench of death engulfs Sudan hospitals, but leaving is mortal danger

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 leukaemia patient, was finally evacuated from the Khartoum Teaching Hospital on Tuesday, the body was still there.

“Because of the intense fighting, the person could not be moved and buried,” Mohamed’s father, Mohamed Ibrahim, 62, told AFP.

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, he told AFP.

With explosions, heavy gunfire and air strikes that have killed hundreds in the capital and in other parts of the country, “morgues are packed and the streets are littered with bodies”, Abdullah said.

According to him, urban warfare between forces loyal to Sudan’s 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”.

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.”

– Hospitals under fire –

At around 1:00 pm on Tuesday, after three days with no food, water or electricity, the father and son finally left, but not to safety.

“The hospital was being shelled,” Ibrahim recounted.

According to the doctors’ union, 13 hospitals nationwide have been shelled and 19 others evacuated since fighting began.