Issue No. 104

Death stalks El Fasher

Across 18 months, through incessant bombardment and induced starvation, the capital of North Darfur held out against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Assault after assault was repelled by predominantly Zaghawa fighters under the army-allied Joint Forces, aware of the massacres of indigenous Darfurians at El Geneina, Nyala, and across Darfur at the hands of the Sahelian Arab paramilitaries in 2023 and 2003. But, eventually, the pressure proved too great, and the city of El Fasher has now fallen to the Emirati-backed RSF-- with all the litany of atrocities feared seemingly coming to pass. Ineffectual pleas from a disengaged international community for the paramilitaries not to burn, kill, rape, and pillage have inevitably fallen on deaf ears. And while Quad-centred negotiations collapsed in Washington, El Fasher's fall redraws Sudan's map in stark and potentially irreversible terms.

With senior Sudanese army commanders having withdrawn and the military effectively surrendering the 6th Infantry Division headquarters on 26 October, the progeny of the Janjaweed appear to be now laying waste to what remains in the bombed-out city. Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who counts Cairo, Riyadh, Tehran and Doha among his allies, announced that the withdrawal was intended to "spare the citizens and the rest of the city from destruction." But pictures, videos, and satellite imagery have already detailed the probable massacres of thousands, with reports detailing block-by-block, house-by-house, indiscriminate killing. And so great has been the gulf of inaction towards the rampaging paramilitaries' crimes that many have not even bothered to cover their faces in self-filmed videos of arbitrary executions. But while the genocidal ambitions of the fundamentally predatory RSF and its allied Arab militias had been readily apparent for months, having razed to the ground dozens of satellite villages and towns surrounding El Fasher, the international community failed to develop a coherent path towards pressuring either belligerent.

Roughly 260,000 people were estimated to have been trapped in El Fasher when it fell, with hundreds of thousands having been displaced in the months before October. Many of these civilians had been displaced by the devastations of Darfur two decades prior, when the Omar al-Bashir regime wielded the Arab paramilitaries as a counter-insurgent force against the indigenous rebel movements. And this week, IOM Sudan reported that more than 26,000 people fled in the two days after the fall of El Fasher. The situation on the roads remains perilous, with RSF fighters filming themselves harassing and gunning down women and children on foot. Nor are they likely to find sufficient humanitarian support at the overcrowded camps at Abu Sheikh or Zamzam, which too have faced attacks from the RSF.

By the siege's final weeks, El Fasher was on its knees – hollowed by months of deliberate starvation, with virtually no food remaining within the city. People were reduced to eating ambaz, the residue from peanut feed fed to animals, and forced to navigate drone and artillery bombardments to find limited calories. As such, many have been too weak to flee El Fasher and are at the mercy of the RSF under a comms blackout. Further, persistent bombardments had rendered much of the city unlivable, forcing civilians and Zaghawa militias to retreat to the western quarters of El Fasher. Hundreds were killed in the indiscriminate attacks, including one missile that killed 75 people on 19 September at the Al Jamia Mosque. But the final three-day assault was reported to have been the most ferocious of the entire 500+ day siege, with the Joint Forces alleging that 2,000 civilians had been killed.

For the assorted coalition of former Darfurian rebels, the withdrawal of the Sudanese army and the loss of El Fasher represent a grim betrayal by their nominal Khartoum allies. Without a consistent air supply from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and facing increasingly sophisticated Gulf-supplied RSF armaments, the Zaghawa, Masalit, and Fur fighters were forced to fight tooth and nail in warren-like trenches carved into the city. The El Fasher Resistance Committees – a Darfurian civilian-watch group – has publicly condemned unnamed SAF officials of deliberately cutting off supplies and air support "to hand the city over to the RSF." Al-Sadig al-Nur, spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement-Minawi faction, damningly revealed that "the Sudanese army massed a force in northern Sudan's al-Dabab two months ago, but it had not been deployed to help El Fasher," even as the city faced its final, decisive assault.

Minni Minnawi, the nominal Darfur governor, has also blasted the military government back in Khartoum, while other alliances between the former indigenous Darfurian rebel groups and SAF appear strained as well. Finance Minister Gibril Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), has remained silent since the fall of the city. Once again, the Sudanese army virtually abandoned the peripheries of the state, focusing its efforts on its own heartlands in the country's centre. But here too are the army wrestling not only with the divisions between its Riverain elite and Darfurian allies, but the Islamist factions within it as well, who are furious at the recent withdrawal at Bara and at growing attempts to diminish their return. These Islamist paramilitary groups have further been accused of a litany of atrocities in Khartoum and Wad Madani, with civilians throughout the civil war treated as collateral and combatants by all sides.

At the same time, the meeting between the Sudanese army and the Quad —Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and the US —in Washington was taking place. Having finally been dragged on board by Cairo, optimism that SAF would be prepared to seriously negotiate was still low, but the talks, led by US envoy for Africa Massad Boulos, could not have gone much worse. Immediate disagreements with the Emirati contingent over the proposed three-month humanitarian truce laid out in the 12 September communique erupted, with the Sudanese reported to have walked out just a few minutes into the meeting.  

But the Quad talks reflected another grim pattern, one of the RSF undertaking its most brutal military operations while a putative move towards a ceasefire or settlement appears on the table. As negotiators met in Washington, it became apparent that the UAE would not intervene to rein in the RSF, which it denies arming, and characterised the situation in El Fasher as a military offensive. During the two rounds of talks under the US-Saudi auspices in Jeddah in May and October 2023, the paramilitaries also wielded the talks as diplomatic cover to lay waste to El Geneina in West Darfur and Nyala in South Darfur. Tens of thousands are believed to have been massacred in these offensives. And so, rather than laying a roadmap to peace, the Quad meeting provided the background to yet more death.

The prospect for future talks now appears to be dashed for the time being, with the de factopartition of Sudan ensured. The RSF already exercises authority across the five Darfur states, swathes of neighbouring Kordofan and parts of the south-eastern provinces. Capturing El Fasher, however, will allow the paramilitaries to better secure their access to allies in Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, and secure the artisanal and industrial gold sites that finance their war machine. Some expect that the paramilitaries will divert their attention back towards Politically, the RSF has pre-emptively moved to institutionalise this territorial hold – a February 2025 charter launching a "Government of Peace and Unity" and the July unveiling of a presidential council and cabinet were explicit attempts to normalise governance on its own terms.

The fall of El Fasher is, above all, a humanitarian catastrophe that will replicate the genocidal horrors of Darfur two decades ago. The UN and other traditional powers have urged a ceasefire, but their ineffectual and spasmodic diplomacy without deploying any leverage has essentially abandoned the people of Sudan, facing the world's largest hunger and displacement crisis. Now, the city's remaining residents – half of whom the UN reported are children – are under complete RSF control, with the consequences all too known.