Analysts predicted bloodshed in the Sudanese city of El Fasher. The international community didn’t act

Reports of mass killings have emerged from the city of El Fasher, which the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured from the Sudanese army a week ago.

So what? Analysts had been warning of the potential for bloodshed in the famine-stricken city for at least two years. But with the world’s attention trained on Ukraine and Gaza, little was done to prevent it. Now it is too late. Following the fall of El Fasher

• thousands of malnourished people have fled into the desert;
• Sudan has become fractured in two, split between the RSF and army; and
• conflict monitors, aid groups, the UN and witnesses have reported atrocities.

Background. El Fasher was the final stronghold controlled by the army in Darfur, a vast area of desert about the size of France. The roughly 260,000 people trapped inside had been besieged by the RSF for 18 months. Many were eating animal feed to survive.

Massacre. The UN said on Wednesday that 460 patients, relatives and doctors had been killed at El Fasher’s last functioning hospital. Satellite images studied by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University show objects near the hospital “consistent with the dimensions of a human body”. Clusters of similar objects are found throughout the city.

Mounting fears. Only a small trickle of people from El Fasher have made it safely to nearby towns. Aid workers fear people weakened by malnutrition may have died while fleeing into the desert, where there is no food or water.

Testimony. Witnesses who escaped to Tawila, a town 50 kilometres from El Fasher, told The Observer they had to avoid roving bands of fighters, who robbed and killed people as they fled. One said: “The road is full of dead. Every few kilometres, you find six, five or four bodies.”

Evidence. RSF fighters have posted footage of themselves shooting unarmed men and walking among heaps of bodies, some in military uniform. Human Rights Watch has geolocated eight videos to a berm that encircles the city.

Recap. Sudan has been at war since April 2023. The RSF and Sudanese army were once uneasy allies that ruled together after overthrowing a civilian-led government in 2021. When the two factions fell out, it plunged the country into chaos.

Neglected. Sudan is the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. Estimates put the death toll at 150,000 but the true number is likely far higher, with several areas experiencing famine.

By the numbers:

13 million – number of people displaced

30 million – number who need aid urgently

90 per cent – proportion of Sudan’s children out of school

Meddling. Outsiders jockeying for regional influence and Sudan’s gold wealth are fuelling the war. Extensive evidence, unearthed by UN investigators and others, suggests that the UAE is funding and arming the RSF. The Emiratis deny this. A recent report in the Guardian indicated that military equipment supplied by the UK to the UAE may have ended up in the RSF’s hands.

Precedent. RSF and its allies killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people in 2023 when it captured El Geneina, another city in Darfur, according to a leaked UN report. Observers had been warning about the possibility of similar violence in El Fasher. The city’s communications are cut, meaning it could be months before the scale of the bloodshed is known.

On the march. The RSF appeared to be on the back foot after the army recaptured Khartoum earlier this year. But with the fall of El Fasher, the group has consolidated its control over the country’s west and split Sudan in two. This may spell its end as a coherent, unified country.

What’s more… Sudan watchers see the violence in Darfur as a continuation of the 2003-2005 genocide in the region. The RSF grew out of the militias that carried out those killings.

Photograph by Mohammed Jammal/UNICEF via AP.