Abdelwahab (his name has been changed) is a miracle survivor. On Sunday, 26 October, as Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soldiers invaded the heart of El Fasher, he managed to escape the carnage for the first time. “We left with fear and hunger in our stomachs,” remembers this 57-year-old resident. “Everywhere, the streets were strewn with bodies.” Endless columns of civilians are fleeing the capital of North Darfur, which has fallen into the hands of General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as « Hemetti » who has been carrying out mass killings among the 260,000 civilians besieged for more than eighteen months.
On the outskirts of the city, Abdelwahab and other displaced persons are stopped at a checkpoint manned by paramilitaries. The men are separated from the women. At gunpoint, they are stripped and gathered together in the dust. Suddenly, bullets fly. Of the hundred or so men, none got back up. Or almost none: “By the grace of God, I survived,” says Abdelwahab. Having survived for the second time, wounded in the leg, it took him several days barefoot to reach the town of Tawila, at the foot of the Jebel Marra mountains.
Of the more than 70,000 people who fled the massacres in El Fasher, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), fewer than 10,000 have managed to reach this area under the control of the Sudan Liberation Movement, one of the only armed groups officially neutral in the conflict that has been ravaging the country since April 2023. Nearly 15,000 civilians have managed to flee to northern Sudan and a few thousand others have found refuge in eastern Darfur.
“Where have all the others gone?” asks Iqbal (not her real name), horrified. Having just arrived in Tawila, this mother has lost track of her seven children. When the FSR launched their final assault, she was watching over one of her sons at the Saudi hospital in El Fasher, where 460 patients were shot dead two days later by paramilitaries, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Managing to escape by the skin of her teeth, she ended up hiding her wounded son in a thicket of bushes to save him from the soldiers. She was arrested and detained for three days before being released and returning to Tawila alone.
“We’re not going to make it much longer.”
“Where are our men? I haven’t found anyone. May God protect them,” laments Iqbal. In the video testimonies sent to Orient XXI, the survivors of El Fasher speak in hushed voices, hidden under sheets stretched over pieces of wood serving as their only makeshift shelter. They are frail and exhausted, struggling to find their words and barely able to articulate. Beyond the trauma of fleeing and witnessing massacres, it is hunger that haunts them. Eighteen months of siege have turned El Fasher into an open-air death camp.
As the paramilitaries tightened their grip on the city, resources dwindled. While shells rained down, not a single box of humanitarian aid was allowed to cross the 55-kilometre sand trench built by the RSF around the city to suffocate its population. Those who tried to flee had to risk being stopped at checkpoints, stripped of their belongings, and sometimes summarily executed by the roadside. In the opposite direction, traders attempting to smuggle bags of rice into the city were shot at point-blank range in the trenches.
“There is nothing left to eat. No more medicine. People eat ambaz, animal feed, once every two days. But lately, it’s not even available on the market any more. So, we boil cowhide to survive. We won’t last long,” a local photographer told us a few days before the final assault on El Fasher. Orient XXI has since lost all contact with him.
“We have been forgotten by the world.”
At the Saudi hospital in El Fasher – the only remaining functioning facility in the city, repeatedly targeted by paramilitary artillery and drone strikes – the situation had been critical for months. “Shells start falling as soon as the morning prayer begins. We lack everything. We live in the stench of blood and death,” a doctor on site told us just hours before the assault. Orient XXI has since lost all contact with him.
“Mothers no longer have milk to feed their infants. And even if you manage to find a bit of money, the market stalls are empty and you risk drone strikes just by going there. We are the marginalized of the marginalized. The world has forgotten us,” a displaced woman sheltering in a school warned. The nearly 260,000 civilians – half of them children – trapped before the final assault were already living like “hostages fearing their imminent execution,” in the words of a resident contacted before the city fell. Orient XXI has since lost all contact with him.
An entire city was waiting for its death amid the guilty silence of the international community. Although humanitarian organizations had been sounding the alarm for months—describing El Fasher as “the pit of hell,” in UNICEF’s words—no credible international initiative was launched to demand the lifting of the siege and prevent the worst-case scenario: famine combined with large-scale massacres.
An ethnic cleansing that began in 2003.
The disaster was predictable. In the wake of the clashes that began in Khartoum on April 15, 2023, between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, the war quickly spread to Darfur, a historical stronghold of paramilitary groups. By June 2023, the RSF had seized the town of El-Geneina in West Darfur, carrying out an ethnic cleansing targeting the Massalit community, which resulted in between 10,000 and 15,000 deaths, according to the United Nations.
All eyes then turned to El Fasher, where the last SAF stronghold in Darfur was positioned. The military garrison, which housed El Fasher’s 6th Infantry Division, was also defended by the Joint Forces – a coalition of former rebel movements – and by local self-defence groups, primarily recruited from the Zaghawa community, a non-Arab ethnic group spanning Sudan and Chad. Home to 1.5 million people, mostly from Darfur’s non-Arab communities, would the city face the same fate as El-Geneina?
Everything seemed to suggest it. To conquer El Fasher, the RSF had amassed tens of thousands of fighters from across Darfur, primarily recruited from the region’s Arab tribes. Their troops, reinforced by Chadian mercenaries and other Arab Sahelian communities, are the descendants of the Janjaweed militias that spread terror across Darfur starting in 2003 participating in the genocide carried out by Omar al-Bashir’s regime. Twenty years later, in this region where the scars of war have never healed, Hemetti’s men are the face of the same nightmare, returning to haunt the inhabitants and continuing their strategy of land grabbing and ethnic cleansing that began in 2003.
The FSR themselves document their crimes
How many civilians were killed in El Fasher? The question remains without a clear answer. In the hours following the fall of the city into the hands of the paramilitaries, between 2,000 and 3,000 civilians were killed.
Over the past two weeks, multiple consistent sources suggest that the number could be double or even triple. With access to the city impossible and communications cut off – only partially bypassed by a handful of local activists and journalists equipped with routers – the only macabre clues were pools of blood visible from space in satellite images. The FSR also documented their own crimes by posting countless videos on social media.
A local journalist, a survivor of El Fasher who wished to remain anonymous, testifies:
We have no news of thousands of people who have disappeared. Doctors, activists, and politicians have been targeted. Dozens of cases of rape have been reported. What happened in El Fasher is not a war between two armies; it is a massacre. An assault driven by hatred, targeting defenceless populations based on ethnic criteria.
On Sunday, October 26, at dawn, the regular army was finally routed by the FSR, who had benefited from increased logistical and military support from the United Arab Emirates, providing General Hemetti’s troops since the beginning of the hostilities with advanced weaponry, drones, and even Colombian mercenaries. Faced with the paramilitaries’ final assault, the contingent of the FAS stationed in the 6th Infantry Division negotiated an indirect safe passage out of the city, leaving civilians unprotected, at the mercy of fighters fuelled by 550 days of siege and hundreds of repeatedly repelled attacks.
The Technological Turning Point of the War
With the fall of El Fasher, a new chapter in the war in Sudan begins. The FSR can now claim near-uncontested control over the five states of Darfur, covering a territory as large as France. At the same time, General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane’s FAS consolidate their hold on the eastern part of the country, notably since the recapture of the capital, Khartoum, in March.
As the war drags on, Sudan is fracturing from east to west, sliding further toward a de facto partition of the country into two distinct zones of control, following the Libyan model. The political, economic, and military division of the country worsened in August with the proclamation of a parallel government by the political wing of the FSR—an alliance called “Tasis”—established in the city of Nyala, in South Darfur. Orwellianly named the “Government of Peace,” this new authority, headed by General Hemetti himself, positions itself as a rival to the government temporarily established in Port Sudan by the SAF, marking yet another step toward the country’s split.
On the ground, neither of the two belligerents claims any intention to divide Sudan. They continue to assert their ambitions to control the entire territory. The frontlines have now shifted to the Kordofan Province, in central Sudan, a theatre of fierce fighting for several months and where an increasingly high-tech war is unfolding. Another turning point in the conflict in Sudan is the growing use of drones by both sides.
While the FSR benefit from Chinese-made drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates, the SAF, for their part, have Turkish and Iranian drones. Indeed, the war has not stopped the looting of Sudan’s natural resources by regional and international powers who profit by supplying both sides with advanced weaponry, a factor that perpetuates the conflict. Although both forces enjoy networks of opposing international alliances, all attempts at mediation appear to be in vain.
Vain Peace Negociations
The most recent attempt, sponsored under Washington’s guidance by the quartet composed of the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, quickly fell apart. A few days after the capture of El Fasher, the FSR announced that they were willing to sign a ceasefire agreement with the regular army, in an attempt to restore their image following the wave of international condemnation for their crimes in Darfur. But the very next day, the paramilitaries were already carrying out a series of drone attacks on civilian and military infrastructure in the eastern part of the country.
For their part, the SAF and the authorities in Port Sudan, infiltrated by the influence of the Sudanese Islamist movement, are sinking further into a belligerent stance. General Burhan has rejected any negotiations with the FSR as long as the paramilitary troops have not withdrawn from areas populated by civilians. While calling for increased support from their Egyptian and Turkish patrons, the regular army has also called for a general mobilisation.
After the fall of El Fasher, it seems that the time is not for negotiations, but rather for the continuation of the war. A new chapter opens in the uninterrupted nightmare of nearly 44 million Sudanese, half of whom are on the brink of famine.
