Over the past two months in Darfur, Sudan, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have carried out horrific atrocities in the city of El Fasher. There they opened fire and killed civilians, already shattered by more than 500 days of siege. People are already starving and are forced to eat animal feed.
Those who manage to escape, often walking to the town of Tawira, 60 km (37 miles) southwest of El Fasher, remain deeply traumatized. Survivors treated in Tawira by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams say the killings are indiscriminate and ethnically targeted. Women have reported harrowing accounts of rape. Orphaned children from El Fasher arrive terrified in the arms of strangers.
People have been massacred, tortured, and summarily executed. Many people are stranded or missing as rampant violence continues unchecked in the city. Thousands of people are still being held for ransom.
My Sudanese colleagues are treating patients while waiting for news of their relatives. Most of my colleagues in Tawira have family members, friends and colleagues killed by the RSF in El Fasher.
The scenes unfolding across Darfur are shocking and outrageous, but they should not be surprising. For months, Sudanese citizens and many observers, including MSF, have warned that this massacre was the inevitable result of the RSF’s takeover of El Fasher.
That’s because we’ve seen it before. When the war began in 2023, RSF captured El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, killing at least 15,000 people, mostly from the Masalit tribe and other non-Arab communities. Displaced and injured people treated by MSF in Chad report being attacked because of their tribe or ethnicity and being told to “leave the country or die.” MSF’s retrospective mortality study showed that mortality rates in the months after April 2023 were 20 times higher than pre-war figures. Nearly one in 20 men between the ages of 15 and 44 were reported missing during this period. There are currently very few Masalit people in El Geneina.
Zamzam camp, located on the outskirts of El Fasher, was once the country’s largest camp for displaced persons. Nor did the carnage that occurred there in April, when the RSF launched a major assault, ring any alarm bells. Long before these massacres, our team in Zamzam had repeatedly warned of the scale of malnutrition and called for a massive humanitarian response, to no avail.
MSF trucks loaded with food remained stranded in North Darfur for months, even as famine was declared in the camp in August 2024. RSF ordered them to go anywhere else but near El Fasher. Subsequently, the displaced and besieged community came under regular shelling, forcing MSF to withdraw from the camp in February 2025.
Far from being the acts of rogue RSF commanders, the mass atrocities that culminated in El Fasher were part of a deliberate campaign to starve, displace, and kill civilians, often along ethnic lines.
According to international organizations and media reports, the RSF is supported by the United Arab Emirates and is responsible for crimes committed in El Fasher. We must immediately stop mass atrocities and targeted killings and provide safe passage for survivors.
Parties to war must uphold not only their obligations under international humanitarian law, but also their obligations under fundamental humanity. Both parties must grant immediate humanitarian access to people in need, regardless of who controls the territory.
But the fact that this tragedy was so predictable highlights how shared and collective the overall failure to protect civilians is.
Too many governments are enabling the death and destruction by choosing not to use their influence to pressure parties to the conflict to stop killing people and blocking humanitarian aid. They choose to issue passive statements of concern while they and their allies provide financial and political support and weapons to destroy, injure, and kill.
More than 20 years ago, the world rallied for Darfur during similar extreme violence. The International Criminal Court has indicted former President Omar al-Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide for atrocities committed by the military and the Janjaweed militia, which later reformed into the RSF.
Today, world leaders cannot look away as other crimes are committed against the same ethnic groups. The US, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other influential countries known as the Quad must act to prevent further atrocities.
As the horrors of El Fasher subside, we must refuse to move toward a “new normal” that accepts such atrocities. We need political engagement, sustained humanitarian mobilization based on an impartial assessment of the situation, and accountability. Last month, the UN Human Rights Council tasked Sudan with an independent fact-finding mission to investigate crimes committed in El Fasher. We call on all countries and parties to support this process.
We need to do more for the people whose lives are still at risk in El Fasher and surrounding towns. And we need to finally end the cycle of violence and ethnic cleansing in Darfur.
The dynamics of the ongoing conflict seem to indicate that El Fasher’s excruciating plight may not be the end of the horrific violence, but rather a milestone in a devastating war that continues to oppress civilian life, particularly in the Kordofan region at this time. We are concerned that more civilian casualties and other atrocities will unfold.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
