They fled to the mountain. Then the mountain collapsed.
Tarsin village, on the slopes of Darfur’s volcanic highlands, shielded civilians from warring groups. But its isolation now complicates response to a catastrophic natural disaster.
Khalid Elwalid in Khartoum
Days after a massive landslide buried about 1,000 people, only a few rescue workers have managed to reach Tarsin, a remote village in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur in Sudan. The landslide on Sunday also killed more than 5,000 animals, including sheep and camels, destroying survivors’ livelihoods.
Volunteers from the citizen-led Emergency Response Rooms (ERR), who reached Tarsin on Wednesday, described the scene as devastating “The [rescue workers] have managed to recover several bodies and the search for the missing continues,” Mujib al-Rahman al-Zubair, who heads the civil authority in the area, told The Continent.
Tarsin is a small farming village nestled in the volcanic highlands of central Darfur. The region has been under the control of non-state armed groups since the early 2000s when the Darfur war erupted. Brutal military campaigns by government forces and Janjaweed militias killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions in the region. Many fled to remote villages like Tarsin.
The remote hilly terrain and absence of proper roads, which shielded the fleeing people from military campaigns, is now limiting their access to the emergency aid they need. “This disaster comes on top of years of war, displacement and isolation in the region,” said Mohialdeen Mohamed, a volunteer on the ERR team that travelled from Golo in the Tawila-Jebel Marra area to Tarsin.
The current war – between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), formerly Janjaweed, and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – pushed even more people into the remote parts.
“We were forced to flee from El Geneina after the RSF attack in November 2023. It was 10 days of terror and ethnicity-driven attacks. We came to start rebuilding our life in Tarsin village,” said Mohamed Abdallah Ahmed.
When the landslide occurred, the 29-year-old was away working on a farm outside Tarsin. He now might be the only survivor in his family.
“Someone called me and said my brother Ismail was dead and the rest of my family had disappeared,” he said. “After decades of war and months of torrential rains, even nature has turned against us.”
Jebel Marra is now home to at least 300,000 civilians cut off from emergency support, while trapped between violence and potential disasters like floods and landslides.
Seasonal rains are likely to become heavier with climate change, while the hillside soils become looser with more people farming them.
On 2 September, Abdul Wahid Mohammed Ahmed al-Nour, whose Sudan Liberation Movement militarily controls the area, issued an appeal for humanitarian support.
He asked for specialised rescue teams to recover bodies, comprehensive evacuation plans, and emergency shelter for nearby communities.
His group has long made Jebel Marra its stronghold, rejecting peace deals from 2006 to 2020. Even after the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, the Sudan Liberation Movement refused to sign the Juba Peace Agreement.
Al-Nour’s call is consistent with what responders say is critically needed. Thousands of people living in the mountainous terrain of Jebel Marra are still at risk, with their mobility hampered by heavy ongoing rains and the absence of proper roads.