Mass killings reported as paramilitary forces capture El Fasher, the last government stronghold in Darfur
KHARTOUM, Sudan — The fall of El Fasher to paramilitary forces last weekend marks a devastating turning point in Sudan’s brutal civil war, with United Nations officials warning that mass executions and ethnic cleansing are unfolding even as the world watches.
After an 18-month siege that left residents starving, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the North Darfur capital on October 26, overrunning the Sudanese army’s last major position in the vast western region. The conquest gives the RSF control of all of Darfur — roughly one-third of Sudan — and raises the specter that Africa’s third-largest country by land area may fracture permanently.
“Women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed — with utter impunity,” Tom Fletcher, the UN’s top humanitarian official, told the Security Council on Thursday. “We cannot hear the screams, but — as we sit here today — the horror is continuing.”
Hospital Massacre Shocks International Community
The most horrific reports emerged from what had been El Fasher’s last functioning hospital. The World Health Organization said Wednesday that more than 460 patients and their family members were shot and killed at the Saudi Maternity Hospital on October 28, two days after the city fell. Six health workers — four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist — were abducted the same day.
Videos circulating online, believed to have been filmed by RSF fighters themselves, show militiamen walking through ransacked hospital wards, stepping over piles of bodies and shooting survivors at point-blank range. While the footage cannot be independently verified, satellite imagery analyzed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab appears to corroborate the accounts of mass killings.
The satellite images show clusters of objects and ground discoloration consistent with human bodies at multiple sites across El Fasher, including the former Children’s Hospital and areas along the city’s defensive perimeter. Yale researchers concluded that the RSF appears to be conducting “systematic and intentional ethnic cleansing” targeting non-Arab communities from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti ethnic groups.
A City Starved Into Submission
El Fasher had become a symbol of both resistance and abandonment. Once a bustling commercial hub of some 250,000 people, the city had been under siege since April 2024, surrounded by RSF forces who prevented food, medicine and humanitarian aid from entering.
By the time the final assault came, residents were eating animal fodder to survive. Medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported that 75 percent of the children under five it screened from El Fasher were acutely malnourished — clear evidence of famine conditions.
The siege ended with a three-day lightning offensive beginning October 23, when RSF units attacked with infantry, armored vehicles, artillery barrages and drone strikes. Sudanese army leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan acknowledged the defeat on October 27, saying his forces had withdrawn “to spare the citizens and the rest of the city from destruction.”
But the retreat did not spare El Fasher’s residents. Local activists report that RSF fighters have gone door to door, executing people based on ethnicity. More than 26,000 people have fled on foot toward the town of Tawila, 43 miles away, with many reporting robberies, kidnappings, sexual assaults and killings by RSF soldiers along the escape routes.
A War the World Has Ignored
Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 when two generals who had jointly seized power four years earlier turned their guns on each other. What began as a power struggle between the national army and the RSF paramilitary force has devolved into a catastrophe of staggering proportions.
The conflict has killed an estimated 150,000 people, displaced more than 14 million from their homes and left 24 million — over 40 percent of Sudan’s population — facing acute food insecurity. The United Nations calls it the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Yet international attention has been scarce. “For over two and a half years, Sudanese voices have cried out for action, accountability and truth and received only statements of ‘concern,'” said Hisham Madani, founder of the Sudanese Civil Movement, a humanitarian organization. “Words have replaced will and silence has become complicity.”
The UN Security Council has held emergency sessions but taken no concrete action to stop the violence. Both Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have been accused of arming opposing sides, turning Sudan into a proxy battleground. UN experts and human rights organizations say the UAE has supplied weapons to the RSF through Libya and Chad, despite the group’s documented record of atrocities. Abu Dhabi denies the allegations.
Over the weekend, the United States convened officials from the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Washington to discuss a possible peace plan, though no breakthrough has been announced.
A Nation Fracturing
With El Fasher’s fall, Sudan now finds itself effectively partitioned. The RSF controls all of Darfur in the west, including the region’s borders with Chad, Libya, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. The Sudanese army holds Khartoum, which it recaptured earlier this year, along with much of the east and north.
In July, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemeti — declared a parallel “Government of Peace and Unity” in western Sudan, directly challenging the army-led administration in Khartoum. The capture of El Fasher, analysts say, may have turned that declaration from propaganda into reality.
“Sudan is highly unlikely to return to a centralized state; it’s headed down the fragmented paths of Libya and Yemen, towards a prolonged stalemate,” said Habto Mehari, a regional analyst.
The RSF has already announced it captured Bara, a crucial transport hub in North Kordofan state that connects Darfur to central Sudan. Its next target appears to be El Obeid, the oil-rich capital of North Kordofan, which would eliminate the buffer between RSF territory and the capital.
Echoes of the Last Darfur Genocide
For many observers, the violence in El Fasher carries chilling echoes of the genocide that devastated Darfur two decades ago. The RSF grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militia that carried out mass killings of non-Arab ethnic groups in the early 2000s under the direction of then-President Omar al-Bashir.
The International Criminal Court indicted Bashir for genocide in 2010, but he remained in power until 2019, when a popular uprising drove him from office. Ironically, the two generals now tearing Sudan apart — Burhan and Hemeti — jointly led that military coup against Bashir before turning on each other.
The United States, UN experts and the Sudanese army all argue that the RSF and its allied Arab militias are committing genocide against African ethnic groups in Darfur. Reports from aid workers and fleeing residents describe systematic targeting of civilians based on ethnicity, mass rape used as a weapon of war, and the deliberate destruction of communities.
“The international community has thus far failed in its responsibility to protect civilians, standing by whilst the RSF perpetrates a succession of ethnically-motivated massacres,” said Shayna Lewis, Sudan specialist at the nonprofit Avaaz.
What Happens Next
UN officials warn that fighting is likely to intensify in the coming weeks. Both sides have deployed drones to strike new targets across Blue Nile, South Kordofan, West Darfur and Khartoum. The territorial scope of the conflict, says the UN’s Martha Pobee, is broadening.
“The risk of mass atrocities, ethnically targeted violence and further violations of international humanitarian law, including sexual violence, remains alarmingly high,” Pobee told the Security Council. “Despite commitments to protect civilians, the reality is that no one is safe in El Fasher. There is no safe passage for civilians to leave the city.”
Some 177,000 civilians remain trapped in El Fasher, according to the International Organization for Migration. More than four million Sudanese refugees have already fled into neighboring Chad, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, straining humanitarian operations and heightening instability in already fragile border regions.
As the war grinds on, fears grow that Sudan — like South Sudan before it — may split permanently. The country has already experienced one partition: South Sudan gained independence in 2011 after decades of civil war. Now, with Darfur under RSF control and the army confined to the east, Sudan’s second fracture appears increasingly inevitable.
“El Fasher is not just another battle,” said Madani. “It is the attempted erasure of a nation’s people and identity while the international community stands by.”
