Yale University’s Institute for Humanitarian Studies said satellite images showed mass killings taking place in the western Sudanese city of El Fasher.
Published October 28, 2025
An analysis of satellite images viewed by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Laboratory (HRL) reveals that the Sudanese city of El Fasher fell into the hands of the Rapid Support Force (RSF), resulting in a massacre carried out by the group.
RSF has been besieging El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in western Sudan, for more than a year and a half. Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced that the RSF militia had withdrawn its forces from its last stronghold in the wider Darfur region late Monday, a day after it captured the main Sudanese army base in El Fasher and declared victory there.
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The fall of El Fasher resulted in “almost 15 months of IPC-5 starvation in the area caused by extensive carpet bombing of the city by the Sudanese Armed Forces, an unknown number of civilian casualties on both sides, and a siege of the city by the RSF,” the HRL report said. HRL made this decision after reviewing satellite imagery and open source and remote sensing data from Monday.
“El Fasher appears to be engaged in a systematic and deliberate process of ethnic cleansing of the non-Arab indigenous communities of the Far, Zaghawa, and Berti peoples through forced relocation and summary executions,” HRL said.
RSF has long been accused of targeting non-Arab communities in Darfur, and HRL, aid groups and experts have previously warned that there would be large-scale violence and displacement if El Fasher is ousted.
HRL’s report shows images that include chunks of objects and discolored ground that appear to be evidence of a human body. HRL appears to support other reports from aid groups that have described chaos on the ground, including murders, arrests and attacks on hospitals.
“RSF actions described in this report may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity (CAH) and may rise to the level of genocide,” the report states.
The war between the RSF and SAF in Sudan began on April 15, 2023 and has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with tens of thousands of people dead and more than 12 million displaced. More than 10 years after the founding of South Sudan, there are fears that Sudan will split again.
Darfur is an RSF stronghold, while the SAF controls Sudan’s capital Khartoum and northern and eastern Sudan. RSF’s advance comes on the heels of last week’s talks by the Quad, a bloc of nations made up of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, that laid out a roadmap to end Sudan’s war.
