University of el-Geneina lecture halls shelter people displaced by Sudan fighting under RSF control

The Faculty of Medicine lecture halls at the University of el-Geneina have been converted into shelters for people displaced by fighting elsewhere in Sudan. Zainab, who did not give her full name, lives in one of the halls with three of her surviving daughters.

She said Sudanese Armed Forces attacked her home in Omdurman on June 26, 2024, killing three of her six children even though no Rapid Support Forces or checkpoints were nearby.

Zainab was a nurse in Omdurman before the attack. Her husband, a police officer, disappeared during fighting in the city. She later built a hut on the university campus grounds that contains a cooking area with two pots, a bedroom with one mattress on the ground for two daughters, a bed for another daughter and her niece, and space outside where she sleeps.

Two of Zainab’s daughters still have shrapnel embedded under their skin from the June 26, 2024 attack. A doctor at El-Geneina Teaching Hospital told her that surgery for both would cost two thousand dollars. El-Geneina is currently under the control of the Rapid Support Forces, which took the city in late 2023.

More than 50,000 people are reported to have been killed during the Sudan civil war that began in April 2023. El-Geneina is home to more than 120,000 displaced people.

Teacher Nagwa, who lives less than a kilometre from the university’s medicine faculty in the al-Nasr neighbourhood, said aid organisations have reduced 50 percent of the suffering in el-Geneina but that this is not enough. Mohamed, an official with an international humanitarian organisation, stated that the exact population of el-Geneina is unclear due to the influx of displaced people, hampering planning for aid distribution.