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.
Carthage, Biafra, Stalingrad, Aleppo, Sarajevo, Tigray, Gaza and El Fasher in Sudan. Deliberate starvation as a weapon of war and as part of siege tactics dates back millennia, a brutal, attritional ploy that does not discriminate between civilian and enemy combatant. For some commanders and regimes, it is motivated by a vicious 'surrender or die' rationale-- but for others, it veers toward the genocidal, an attempt to wipe out an entire people or population. And in the case of the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' (RSF) months-long siege on the city of El Fasher in Darfur, it is hard to view the choking siege and induced starvation as anything other than genocide.