Dr. Omar Selik yearned to be seen, truly seen. After a grueling, hour-long interview detailing the horrors of life in Sudan’s besieged city of El Fasher—communicating through a fragile satellite internet connection—he requested to turn on his camera. His face, etched with exhaustion and the scars of war, materialized on screen, then softened into a wide, disarming grin.
“This is a good day for me,” Dr. Selik declared, a wave of palpable relief washing over his features. “I feel like a human being again.” I found myself smiling in return, a shared moment of fragile hope.
This brief, human connection offered him a momentary respite after 500 days under a brutal siege. Dr. Selik, 43, served as one of the last remaining health workers in El Fasher, a city in western Darfur where a quarter-million desperate residents faced constant aerial bombardments and an ever-present threat of starvation.
Just moments before, Dr. Selik had wept as he recounted the tragic death of a pregnant woman under his care, a life lost due to the sheer lack of basic medicines. He then lowered his camera, inviting me to see his lunch. What I saw was almost unbelievable.
He held up a plate of coarse, brown mush—animal fodder typically reserved for camels and cows. This, he explained, had become the primary food source for most people in El Fasher, a stark and disturbing testament to how both he, the doctor, and the lives he fought to save had been dehumanized by the conflict.
Sudanese residents gathered to receive food in El Fasher, a city in Darfur that has been under a siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since April 2024.
That was why it felt so good to speak with someone on the outside, he said: “People are dying, and nobody is even watching.”
For me, it was also a moment of clarity. Since Sudan’s civil war started in April 2023, I had been unable to enter Darfur, ground zero of a nationwide famine and the site of a crushing siege. Now, through the fog of war, I had found someone whose raw, urgent testimony crystallized the depravity of the conflict.
And then he was gone.
Days later, Dr. Selik left his home to attend dawn prayers at a nearby mosque. A missile slammed through the roof, exploding among the worshipers and killing about 75 people. Dr. Selik was among them.
Dr. Omar Selik, top, spoke via a satellite internet connection with the journalists Declan Walsh, bottom right, and Abdalrahman Altayeb.
His death was the latest example of the brutal combination of technology, impunity, and sheer violence that defines this war, a conflict that has claimed as many as 400,000 lives by some expert estimates. Witnesses reported that the missile was fired by a drone, one of many allegedly supplied to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group besieging El Fasher, by the United Arab Emirates. The Emirates, however, denies any involvement in backing either side of the conflict.
For the city’s beleaguered residents, Dr. Selik’s death was yet another devastating loss. “My heart is broken,” said Salwa Ahmed, a university lecturer who had found refuge in Dr. Selik’s home.
Like many others, Ms. Ahmed felt abandoned by the international community and deeply skeptical that help would ever arrive. However, a faint glimmer of hope has appeared on the horizon, spearheaded by President Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos.
For weeks, Mr. Boulos has been tirelessly negotiating with the RSF to secure humanitarian access to El Fasher. Last week, he indicated that an aid convoy could arrive “very, very soon.”
A senior U.S. official, speaking anonymously due to the sensitivity of the talks, suggested the convoy might consist of around 45 U.N. trucks, potentially setting out as early as next Monday. Crucially, details regarding the distribution of aid once it reaches the stricken city are still being finalized.
The U.S. official expressed uncertainty about whether the RSF would permit aid to reach neighborhoods held by its adversary, the Sudanese military—the very areas that have endured the most severe impact of the siege.
The State Department declined to comment on the ongoing discussions, referring instead to Mr. Boulos’s previous public statements regarding his efforts in Sudan.
Volunteers prepared meals for residents of El Fasher, a besieged city in Sudan’s western Darfur region, in August.
The siege of El Fasher commenced in April 2024 as the RSF, largely composed of fighters from Darfur, sought to expel Sudan’s military from the vast region. The conflict escalated dramatically in March after the RSF was driven out of Khartoum, the nation’s capital.
While others fled, Dr. Selik chose to remain. “He said, ‘I can’t leave these people behind,’” recalled Omer Eltayeb, a fellow doctor living in Ireland, who last spoke with him in July.
Dr. Selik dedicated himself to the city’s last functioning hospital, which had already been bombed 30 times. There, he rapidly retrained as a combat medic. “Head trauma, chest trauma, punctured abdomens,” he listed, describing the common injuries he treated. “Anything caused by a bullet or a bomb.”
This summer, the crisis worsened significantly after RSF fighters constructed a formidable earthen wall around El Fasher, now stretching 42 miles long. Anyone attempting to cross it at night was shot dead.
At the hospital, food and medicine supplies dwindled to nothing. Surgeons improvised, using mosquito nets as medical gauze during operations, while cholera and malaria outbreaks ravaged the wards.
One day, at a small clinic he managed in the northern part of the city, Dr. Selik encountered a group of Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the RSF. “They were speaking Spanish,” he noted. Later, he said, the bodies of Colombians killed in battle were brought to the hospital.
Dr. Selik had sent his wife and children to Khartoum for their safety. Yet, tragedy still struck his family when his sister and her three children were killed in August by a shell that crashed into their home. “That’s just one story,” he confided. “In this city, there are so many like it.”
A Starlink terminal, provided by a relative, offered a crucial lifeline to the outside world. Yet even through this connection, the conflict’s divisiveness found him. In WhatsApp groups of Sudanese medics, Dr. Selik was disheartened by bitter disputes that erupted along political or ethnic lines, as Dr. Eltahir recounted.
“People were calling each other pigs,” he said. “Omar asked them to stop.”
But the Starlink terminal also provided him a means to call for urgent help. What worried him most, Dr. Selik told me, was the potential fate of the city if the RSF completely overran it. “They will kill everyone,” he warned.
Aid workers and American officials share similar grave concerns. The U.S. official indicated that the city could fall to the RSF within weeks, or even sooner. Many fear a repeat of the devastating massacre in El Geneina, in western Darfur, in late 2023, where RSF fighters reportedly killed as many as 15,000 people, according to United Nations accounts.
“We fear that as the battle for the city intensifies, the worst is yet to come,” stated Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, at the United Nations in New York last week. “We should not allow this to happen.”
Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from Khartoum, Sudan.