Both doctors and patients describe the situation in hospitals as appalling. Sudanin the face of raging hostilities in the country.

Last Saturday, Ibrahim Mohamed saw that the one who was lying in a nearby hospital bed where he was being treated had died. Three days later and With the suffocating smell of the rotting dead next to him, he was forced to run to escape the bullets.

In Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, power struggle between two generals The healthcare system, already brought to its knees by the wars and international sanctions that have plagued the country for decades, has fired a free shot.

After more than a week of open fighting in the heart of the Sudanese capital of 5 million, patients and doctors describe absolute horror.

Mohamed Ibrahim, 62, regularly visits his 25-year-old son Ibrahim in the hospital, where he is being treated for leukemia. On April 15, his nightmare took a completely different turn.

His son’s neighbor died, “but his body was left there because of the fighting,” M. Ibrahim told AFP.

“Decomposing corpses remain in rooms”

For Dr. Athiya Abdullah, secretary-general of the medical association, scenes of this kind are no longer uncommon in Sudan amidst the chaos: “decomposing bodies remain in hospital wards” because they cannot be transported anywhere else.

“The morgues are full, corpses are scattered in the streets, even hospitals that treat the wounded can stop all activity at any moment,” he says, exhausted. Across the city, the crossfire makes no difference between doctors, patients, and hospitals.

Mohammed Ibrahim was forced to make a difficult choice: “Either they stay (in the hospital), enduring the smell of rot, or they leave, risking being shot.”

However, after they passed three Vdays without food, water And electricity in the hospital, “we were told to leave because there was fighting and the hospital was under fire.”

OUR World Health Organization (WHO) counted yesterday, Sunday, “eight dead and two wounded” among the medical staff.

In total, according to the doctors’ union, 13 hospitals were bombed, and 19 were forced to close – due to lack of supplies or by order of the military.

“We are forced to refuse patients because they risk being shot if they stay,” says Dr. Abdullah.

Mohamed Ibrahim was forced to carry his sick son “on foot, under fire and in the midst of fighting” for five hours until they reached home.

His son is still languishing there now, because, according to Dr. Abdullah, since almost three-quarters of the hospitals have ceased operations, and “surgical operations are carried out only in cases of emergency”, not a single hospital could accept him.

“Two doctors for one hospital”

And this is because now in the hospitals of Khartoum and other areas affected by the fighting, everyone is sharing the bulletin: “we are facing lack of medical and surgical equipmentfuel for generators, ambulances, blood transfusions,” the doctor notes.

“Some hospitals the same health workers have been working since April 15 without days off. Some hospitals have only one surgeon, sometimes there are only two doctors for the entire hospital,” he continues.

And all calls for a humanitarian ceasefire or for safe corridors they got nowhere still. Medical workers are often attacked, the UN says, and for life-and-death combatants, hospitals are no longer a safe haven.

Through social networks residents are trying organize find cures for family members suffering from chronic diseases.

However, available stocks they are deteriorating in front of everyone And UNICEF has already announced that fighting and power outages could wipe out the nation’s 40 million stock of insulin and vaccines.

Friday when another ceasefire promise gone unheededthe medical association gave Facebook instructions for handling, transporting and burying the decomposing corpse.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}