By William Wallis in Cairo
Published Wednesday 29 October 2025 - full copy:
Sudan siege ends in bloodbath despite pleas for mercy
Evidence emerges of atrocities committed by the paramilitary RSF after it seized control of El Fasher
The fall of the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher has turned into a bloodbath that rights activists and experts have foretold for months, according to local and international organisations monitoring the war.
Since Sunday — when militia fighters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over-ran the military garrison in the city, the last stronghold of the Sudan Armed Forces in the west of the country — evidence has emerged of many atrocities against civilians trapped or trying to flee.
The UN Human Rights Office said it was receiving multiple, alarming reports, including of summary executions committed by the RSF, since the group seized most of El Fasher in the western region of Darfur. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, is vying for control of all of Sudan.
“Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters,” the UN said.
Jim Risch, Republican chair of the US Senate foreign relations committee, said on X that the RSF should be designated a foreign terrorist organisation.
“The horrors in Darfur’s El Fasher were no accident — they were the RSF’s plan all along,” he said. “The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people . . . America is not safer, secure or more prosperous with the RSF slaughtering thousands.”
The RSF’s capture of El Fasher has potentially far-reaching consequences for Sudan and its two-year civil war.
The conflict has displaced more than 14mn people, according to the UN, provoked famine and claimed more than 150,000 lives.
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Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, is head of the RSF
© Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters
El Fasher is the largest city in western Sudan and sits at a crossroads of trade routes, giving the RSF greater control of the flow of weapons and supplies into the region through Libya and Chad.
The end of the siege, and the flight of the SAF and allied former rebels on Sunday, potentially frees up RSF militants to take the fight back to areas of the east and centre of Sudan from which they were driven earlier this year.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military leader and Hemedti’s rival, on Monday said the army had withdrawn as a result of the “systematic destruction they endured” in the city.
The killings that have ensued, despite repeated warnings based on previous massacres committed by the RSF, marks a new low for decades-long international efforts to protect civilians from war crimes.
In videos posted online in the past two days, fighters from the RSF, which grew out of the Janjaweed militia that wreaked havoc on Darfur’s Black tribes in the early part of the century, shout racial slurs and revel in pursuing rake-thin men, women and children fleeing across the scrub outside the city.
Satellite image shows objects on the ground near what are likely to be RSF vehicles in El Fasher on Monday © AP
Dozens of captured men, bound and lying in rows along the ground, are denigrated and then executed in footage allegedly posted from RSF accounts.
Among those captured was Muammar Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who has chronicled the fate of civilians trapped in the city during a nearly 19-month siege. Inhabitants depended on dwindling supplies of animal feed and were under constant drone and artillery bombardment.
Many advocacy groups have been demanding the release of the Al Jazeera contributor.
Among those killed on Sunday, according to Sudanese activists in touch with the city and surrounding camps for the displaced, was Siham Hassan, a prominent campaigner for social justice. She was once Sudan’s youngest MP and was running a community kitchen.
Nathaniel Redmond, director of the Yale school of public health, said on Tuesday that the “horror, scale and velocity of killing” in El Fasher had left pools of blood visible from satellites.
Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab — which has been tracking the siege using satellite imagery, open-source online information and testimony from eyewitnesses — said it had found “multiple credible reports of mass killings across social media and open sources” in recent days.
Satellite imagery showing bodies on the ground and “vehicles in tactical formations consistent with house-to-house clearance operations” in a neighbourhood with thousands of civilians also supported allegations that the RSF had carried out mass killings, Yale’s HRL said.
“The world must act immediately to put the maximum amount of pressure on the RSF and its backers, specifically the [United Arab Emirates], to end the killing now,” it said, adding that the RSF’s actions “may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide”.
Sudanese refugees from Zamzam camp outside El Fasher receive food at an emergency kitchen while being relocated to a transit camp near the Chad border in Tine, eastern Chad, in May © Getty Images
“The nations of the world might be able to say that they could not have stopped it, but they cannot reasonably say that they did not know,” Yale’s HRL said.
The RSF said it was committed to “protecting civilians in El Fasher”, and had deployed specialised teams to clear landmines and “secure the streets and public spaces”.
It described the “liberation” of El Fasher as “a milestone in the Sudanese people’s struggle against oppression and terrorism”.
The parallel government launched under Hemedti in Darfur said it condemned any violations and would establish committees to investigate the veracity of videos of atrocities circulating online.
Western officials, including the UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper and Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s adviser on Arab and African affairs, urged the militia to open up the area to humanitarian access and to “protect civilians”. But these entreaties from afar have had little obvious effect on the fighters on the ground.
Critics of the west’s ineffectual response to the Sudanese civil war said that only severe pressure on the UAE, which has allegedly backed the RSF with weapons supplies and trade in gold but denies involvement, could prevent further atrocities in El Fasher.
“It is beyond an open secret that the United Arab Emirates is arming and supporting the RSF,” said Protection Approaches, a UK-based charity that campaigns against identity-based violence.
“The single most effective action that could bring pause to the massacre in El Fasher is for the right call from Abu Dhabi to be placed to RSF leadership,” it added.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025. All rights reserved.
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