![[ALT: Satellite view of El Fasher, North Darfur, after the RSF siege and capture in October 2025, showing destruction and displacement]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlyFkFYIVO8NaSuVrPtQIKoeqzG14fYd6ud3KYrtV4aL-TFUNu4L5oHpC4HQOy1H3NkS0xtwMX86lVgCYRI5ic_hJVap7x_CaBjZ5vDi4Higy7vQR9I5UYT_2uB2NIz9WHEIqHunXwLEF4JTYfDTTfhO3tupfcQwcGbfHcw84hZesd5vZSUMYP_GfW6Jk/w1600-rw/IMG_20251101_132355.jpg)
The satellite image arrived at Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab on the morning of October 27, 2025. What analysts saw stopped them cold: clusters of objects consistent with human bodies, some already being burned and buried, scattered across the Daraja Oula neighborhood of El Fasher. The city had fallen the day before. The RSF was erasing the evidence in real time.
By the time the world began to pay attention — and it did so slowly, reluctantly, amid a global media landscape saturated with other crises — the UN Human Rights Office had already documented over 6,000 killings in the first three days alone following the RSF takeover. The true toll, investigators warned, is undoubtedly far higher. The governor of Darfur, Minni Minnawi, put the figure at 27,000 dead in those opening seventy-two hours. Researchers at the Khartoum-based Confluence Advisory think-tank estimated 100,000 killed, while Yale's lab calculated that of the 250,000 civilians still trapped inside the city, virtually all had either been killed, forcibly displaced, or were hiding in the rubble.
What unfolded in El Fasher was not a battle between two military forces fighting over terrain. It was — in the language now used by the United Nations itself — a genocide. And it happened in full view of the world's most sophisticated surveillance infrastructure, documented frame by frame from space, while the international community held summits, issued statements, and did almost nothing to stop it.
Eighteen Months of Calculated Starvation: The Siege of El Fasher
To understand what happened on October 26, 2025, you need to start eighteen months earlier. When the RSF imposed a total siege on El Fasher in April 2024, the city was already carrying the weight of its own tragic history. It had survived the Darfur genocide of 2003. It had absorbed wave after wave of internally displaced people fleeing violence elsewhere in the region. By May 2024, an estimated 1.5 million people were sheltering there — at least 800,000 of them already displaced from somewhere else.
The siege was not accidental. It was an explicit military strategy. The RSF — led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as Hemeti — cut off food, medicine, and all supply routes into the last major SAF stronghold in Darfur. Over the following months, El Fasher's population shrank by 62%, dropping to around 413,000, as people fled under fire or simply died. Those who remained resorted to eating animal fodder. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in March 2025 that more than 200 health facilities in El Fasher were no longer operational. MSF suspended operations in August 2024 after repeated attacks on supported hospitals.
The IPC — the international system used to classify famine severity — rated parts of El Fasher at Phase 5, the highest level. The latest nutrition survey from the region recorded a Global Acute Malnutrition rate of 53%, of which 35% were classified as Severe Acute Malnutrition. These are numbers that, in any other context, would have triggered emergency Security Council sessions and international airlifts within hours.
"I was born in El Fasher and the people who were murdered, raped, tortured, starved, and displaced are my friends, family, and neighbors."Omer Gamar-Eldin Ismail — Senior Adviser, Yale Humanitarian Research Lab; former acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sudan
In the final weeks before the city fell, the RSF constructed an earthen berm — a wall of earth — completely encircling El Fasher to trap the remaining civilian population inside when the assault came. Yale's researchers identified it in satellite imagery. They documented it. They reported it to governments, to the UN, to anyone who would listen. The berm went up anyway.
The October 2025 Massacre: What the UN Actually Found
On September 19, 2025 — just over a month before the final assault — RSF fighters bombed Al Jamia Mosque during Friday prayers. It was not a stray shell. It was a signal of what was coming. On October 26, the RSF seized full control of El Fasher following the retreat of the SAF's 6th Infantry Division. What followed in the immediate aftermath was, in the words of the UN Human Rights Office, "a wave of intense violence… shocking in its scale and brutality."
Mass Killings at Al-Rashid University
One of the single most devastating incidents involved approximately 1,000 civilians who had gathered at Al-Rashid dormitory on the grounds of El Fasher University, believing a university campus might offer some protection. RSF fighters opened fire with heavy weapons. Around 500 people were killed in that single incident. A witness described seeing "bodies thrown into the air, like a scene out of a horror movie." Multiple witnesses — interviewed independently in northern Sudan and eastern Chad in the weeks that followed — gave consistent, corroborating accounts.
The UN OHCHR report, published in February 2026, concluded there were grounds to believe the RSF committed murder as a war crime; intentional targeting of civilians; indiscriminate attacks; use of starvation as a method of warfare; attacks on medical and humanitarian personnel; rape and sexual violence; torture; pillage; and the conscription of children into hostilities. It is difficult to find a category of war crime that is not present in this list.
- 6,000+ killings documented in the first 3 days (UN OHCHR, February 2026)
- 4,400+ killed within El Fasher itself; over 1,600 along escape routes
- 150 clusters of human remains identified via satellite imagery — many burned and buried by RSF forces (Yale HRL)
- 72% of human remains clusters had shrunk in size by late November as RSF erased evidence (Yale HRL)
- 260,000+ civilians trapped in the city at the time of the assault
- 1.17 million people originally from El Fasher have now been displaced — 13% of all IDPs in Sudan
In December 2025, a UN team finally gained access to El Fasher for the first time since its fall. They found a largely deserted city. Denise Brown, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, described it with quiet devastation: there were "very few people" visible during the hours-long visit. The city that had sheltered over a million souls was, by then, largely empty — a crime scene, as UN officials put it, being methodically cleaned.
The UN's Genocide Finding: What It Means and Why It Matters
In February 2026, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released its report. It was titled, without any diplomatic ambiguity: "Hallmarks of Genocide in El Fasher." The mission found that the RSF had committed three of the acts prohibited under Article 2 of the Genocide Convention: deliberate killings of members of the Fur and Zaghawa ethnic groups; the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm; and the deliberate imposition of conditions of life designed to bring about the physical destruction of these communities.
The Mission's chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, stressed that what happened in El Fasher was not a series of uncoordinated battlefield excesses. The scale, the coordination, and the fact that RSF commanders publicly endorsed the operation demonstrate, in his assessment, that it meets the characteristics of genocide under international law.
"This criminality is being repeated in town after town in Darfur — organised, widespread, mass criminality including mass executions."Nazhat Shameem Khan — Deputy Prosecutor, International Criminal Court, briefing the UN Security Council, January 2026
The ICC has since opened a formal investigation. In October 2025 — shortly before El Fasher fell — an ICC trial chamber convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, a former Janjaweed militia leader, of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur in 2003-04. In December 2025, he was sentenced to twenty years. It was the first such conviction, and it came more than two decades after the crimes. The survivors of El Fasher will be waiting for a very long time.
In February 2026, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on four senior RSF figures, including the brother of Hemeti himself, including travel bans and asset freezes. Seven Sudanese survivors filed a communication with the ICC seeking investigation of Emirati business figures and officials over the UAE's reported support for RSF operations. Sudan filed a genocide case at the International Court of Justice against the UAE, though the Court rejected Sudan's request for provisional measures.
The Proxy War Behind the Genocide: Who Is Arming Whom
The conflict in Darfur has never been purely internal. That was true in 2003, when Khartoum armed the Janjaweed militias to fight non-Arab insurgents. It is even more true today, when Sudan functions as one of the most heavily externalized civil wars on the African continent.
| Country/Actor | Side Supported | Nature of Support | Status (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Arab Emirates | RSF | Weapons, drone bases, gold trade networks, mercenaries | Denies involvement; named in genocide case at ICJ; UNSC sanctions on RSF allies |
| Egypt | SAF (Sudan Armed Forces) | Military equipment, diplomatic backing | Active; hosting Sudanese refugees; backs SAF government |
| Russia / Wagner | SAF (historically RSF) | Gold mining concessions, military training | Reduced presence post-Wagner restructuring; Russia backs SAF |
| Turkey | SAF | Drone technology, diplomatic support via Port Sudan | Active |
| Iran | SAF | Drone supplies reported | Reported; unconfirmed officially |
| Chad / Libya | RSF (via porous borders) | Transit routes for weapons and fighters | Ongoing; Chad hosts 600,000+ Sudanese refugees |
The UAE's role deserves particular scrutiny. A New York Times investigation found that Emirati drone bases — officially registered as humanitarian facilities — were also functioning as weapons smuggling hubs supplying the RSF. RSF-controlled gold mines in Darfur supply Emirati trading companies directly, generating the hard currency that funds the militia's operations. Sudan is, in this sense, paying for its own destruction: blood gold flows out through Dubai, weapons flow back in through Chad.
Drone attacks have become the defining horror of 2026. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk reported that drone strikes killed over 1,000 Sudanese civilians in the first five months of 2026 alone. Data from 2024 to 2025 showed a 600% increase in drone-related deaths and an 81% increase in drone attacks. Both sides — SAF and RSF — are using drones against civilian targets, though the RSF's campaign has been more systematic and ethnically targeted.
A comprehensive investigation into the regional powers, militia financing networks, and historical roots that have made the Sudan genocide possible — and profitable for those who fund it.
The Humanitarian Collapse: Numbers That Should Break the World
Sudan is now, by every major international metric, the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet. Not the worst in Africa. Not among the worst. The worst.
The World Food Programme projects that 33.7 million Sudanese will require humanitarian assistance in 2026. That is two-thirds of the entire population of a country of 50 million. Of those, 11.5 million have been forcibly displaced — 7.2 million internally and 4.2 million who have crossed into neighbouring countries. Sudan has surpassed Syria. It has surpassed Yemen. It receives a fraction of the attention given to either.
WHO data, validated through the end of 2025, shows 201 confirmed attacks on health facilities since the war began in April 2023, with 1,858 deaths and 490 injuries directly tied to those attacks. More than 1,600 health worker deaths were recorded in 2025 alone. Cholera, dengue, malaria, measles, and diphtheria are all spreading simultaneously through a population system that can no longer contain any of them. Sudanese children — more than seven million of them — are currently out of school, according to UNICEF estimates cited in a Lancet analysis from November 2025.
- 33.7 million people requiring humanitarian aid in 2026 — up from 30.4M in 2025 (WFP / UN)
- 53% Global Acute Malnutrition rate in North Darfur's Um Baru area (WHO nutrition survey)
- 16% of required humanitarian funding currently available; 2025 plan received under 25% of its $4.2B goal
- 200+ health facilities in El Fasher alone no longer operational before the fall (OCHA)
- 1,858 deaths from attacks on health care facilities validated by WHO since April 2023
- 54% of Sudan's fertiliser imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, threatening agricultural collapse (UNCTAD)
The funding crisis compounds everything. The Berlin donors' conference held on April 15, 2026 — the three-year anniversary of the war — sought to raise $1 billion from a $3 billion needs plan. Sudan aid summits in 2024 and 2025, held in Paris and London respectively, fell well short of their targets. The UN Development Programme estimates current funding covers only 16% of needs. Donor fatigue is not an abstraction. It has a body count.
The Accountability Gap: Why Justice Has Taken 20 Years and Still Counting
The conviction of Ali Kushayb in October 2025 was, on its face, a milestone. A former Janjaweed commander, guilty of crimes against humanity in Darfur, sentenced to twenty years — the first such conviction from the 2003 genocide. The ICC's Deputy Prosecutor rightly called it a step forward. But it took twenty-two years to get there. And the crimes it addressed are now being replicated, at greater scale, with better weapons, in the same region.
Four other ICC fugitives connected to the original Darfur crimes remain at large, including former president Omar al-Bashir. The ICC's jurisdiction in Sudan is still formally limited to Darfur, meaning that atrocities elsewhere in the country — in Khartoum, in Kordofan, in the dozens of communities that have been destroyed by both sides — exist in a legal grey zone. A coalition formed in February 2026 by Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK has committed to pressing for accountability and expanded jurisdiction, but the institutional machinery for this moves with grinding slowness against the speed of a civil war that kills civilians daily.
The broader lesson of Sudan — the lesson that previous Darfur advocates drew in 2004, and that a new generation of analysts is drawing again now — is that the absence of immediate consequences for atrocities is itself a cause of atrocities. The RSF commanders who ordered the burning of Zamzam camp in April 2025 (which killed more than 1,000 people and forced 400,000 to flee) did so knowing that the commanders who ordered El Geneina in 2023 faced no meaningful accountability. The berm around El Fasher went up because no one stopped it. The pattern holds.
"For three years, we have warned that Sudan was on the brink of catastrophe, and those warnings have gone unanswered. This is not just a conflict — it is a collapse of an entire country."Richard Data — Sudan Director, International Rescue Committee, April 2026
What would accountability actually require? Human Rights Watch, in its April 2026 report coinciding with the Berlin conference, outlined a clear set of demands: full support for the ICC's Darfur investigation; pressing for the handover of Bashir and other ICC-indicted figures; publicly naming the UAE and other external backers; enforcing the existing Darfur arms embargo and extending it to cover all of Sudan; and establishing humanitarian corridors with genuine international guarantees. These are not radical demands. Most of them have been endorsed in various UN resolutions that have subsequently been ignored.
De Facto Partition and What Comes Next for Sudan
With the fall of El Fasher, the RSF now controls all five of Darfur's regional capitals. It holds an estimated 40 to 50% of Sudan's territory, including most of Darfur, significant parts of Kordofan, and key sections of Khartoum. The SAF, which retook the capital from the RSF in a major counter-offensive, now holds the east and north. Sudan is, in the assessment of most analysts, already functionally partitioned. The question is not whether this partition is real — it is — but whether it becomes permanent and what governance structures emerge in RSF-controlled territory.
The risk of further genocide is not hypothetical. The UN Fact-Finding Mission explicitly warned in February 2026 that the risk of further genocidal acts remains serious given the RSF's territorial expansion and its demonstrated pattern of behaviour. Fighting has already spread into Kordofan following El Fasher's fall. The UNSC condemned a major RSF raid on Misteriha in North Darfur in February 2026 that killed at least 28 people. In April, an RSF offensive against the Dar Zaghawa region threatened to close the last remaining escape route to Chad.
SAF leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has publicly rejected negotiations, insisting the war will end only with the RSF's unconditional surrender and withdrawal from all occupied areas. The RSF, having consolidated its territorial gains, has little incentive to negotiate from a position of strength. The UN Secretary-General's envoy, Ramtane Lamamra, continues shuttle diplomacy between Port Sudan and Addis Ababa. There is, as of mid-2026, no ceasefire.
The Sudanese people — particularly the non-Arab communities of Darfur who have now lived through two genocides in twenty years — have not been passive victims in this history. Resistance committees, community networks, and self-organized aid structures have formed across both SAF- and RSF-controlled territory. Sudanese journalists and activists, many operating from exile, have documented atrocities and kept the information flowing at considerable personal risk. The communications blackouts imposed by the RSF — destroying towers, cutting internet access — have slowed but not stopped this documentation.
What the people of El Fasher asked for was not complicated. They asked the world to watch. To keep its eyes on Sudan. The satellite images exist. The witness testimonies exist. The UN reports exist. The question that 2026 leaves unanswered is whether the watching itself, without action, is enough to stop the killing — or whether it merely ensures the killing is better documented for the historians who come later.
📚 Sources & References
- UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) — RSF violations in El Fasher amount to war crimes, February 2026
- Yale School of Public Health — UN Concludes RSF Committed Genocide; Yale HRL provided satellite evidence, 2026
- Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026: Sudan
- Human Rights Watch — Sudan: World Leaders Need to Act on Ongoing Atrocities, April 2026
- UN News — ICC Prosecutor briefs UNSC: "Atrocities repeated town by town," January 2026
- Al Jazeera — UN finds El Fasher a "crime scene," first access since RSF takeover, December 2025
- Health Policy Watch — Sudan's Catastrophic Civil War Enters Fourth Year, April 2026
- The Lancet — El Fasher crisis: over 500 days under siege, November 2025
- Council on Foreign Relations — Civil War in Sudan, Global Conflict Tracker (updated 2026)
- World Health Organization (WHO) — Public Health Situation Analysis: Sudan Conflict, 2026
- UN News — Mass displacement, trafficking fears deepen crisis in El Fasher, November 2025