In imagery collected on Monday over El Fasher, a city in the the Darfur region of Sudan, the presence of two clusters of light and dark-coloured objects consistent with the size of human bodies, reddish ground discolouration and vehicles are visible.© Airbus DS 2025/The Associated Press
Massacres of civilians in Darfur this week have become so extensive that the pools of blood in the streets can be detected from space, an analysis of satellite images has found.
By Tuesday morning, more than 2,000 unarmed civilians – mostly women and children – had been killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after its capture of the besieged city of El Fasher, according to a coalition of Darfur militia forces affiliated with the Sudanese army.
The analysis of satellite images, by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, confirmed there is evidence of mass killings in house-to-house operations by RSF soldiers in the city in western Sudan.
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“When the Humanitarian Research Lab saw apparent pools of blood in satellite imagery from El Fasher, I at first couldn’t believe it,” said the lab’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond.
“However, it is what we are seeing. The horror, scale and velocity of killing happening now is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a quarter century of doing this work.”
A report from his research lab said the satellite images showed “objects consistent with the size of human bodies on the ground near RSF vehicles, including at least five instances of reddish earth discoloration.” The lab’s experts have concluded that the red discolouration is blood from the killings, Mr. Raymond said.
Displaced Sudanese people, who fled El-Fasher after the city fell to the RSF, arrive in the town of Tawila on Tuesday.-/AFP/Getty Images
The pace of killing can only be compared to that of the Rwanda genocide in 1994, he told an online media briefing on Tuesday.
The Sudan war, which erupted in 2023 after a power struggle between Sudan’s army and the RSF, is considered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It has forced 12 million people from their homes, killed hundreds of thousands and left 30 million people in need of emergency aid.
Here’s what you need to know about the war in Sudan, including how the conflict started, and its human toll so far.
The satellite images from El Fasher are a snapshot of what happened in just the first 24 hours after the RSF captured the city, Mr. Raymond said. “We are only at the beginning of a wave of violence that will continue to put bodies on the ground. It is as bad as it gets, and it can actually get a hell of a lot worse very quickly.”
In unverified videos of the atrocities in El Fasher, posted online by the RSF itself, the RSF fighters hurl racial epithets at the victims as they beat or shoot them. The videos show that the RSF soldiers “feel free to carry out mass atrocities with little fear of consequences,” Human Rights Watch researcher Mohamed Osman said in a statement on Tuesday.
The satellite images are a snapshot of what happened in the first 24 hours after the RSF captured El Fasher, Humanitarian Research Lab’s executive director Nathaniel Raymond says.© Airbus DS 2025/The Associated Press
In several massacres since the Sudan war began in 2023, the RSF has targeted indigenous non-Arab ethnic minorities. Human-rights groups and the U.S. government have termed it a genocide.
For more than two years, Mr. Raymond and other experts have warned the United Nations Security Council that massacres were looming in El Fasher if the RSF captured the city. In an earlier assault in 2023, the RSF killed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians in the Darfur city of El Geneina, UN reports said.
Jacqueline Parlevliet, a spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, said those who fled El Fasher this week have reported a wave of ethnically targeted killings, often aimed at the most vulnerable people, including people with disabilities who are unable to escape the city.
El Fasher, once a city of about 1.5 million people, contained about 250,000 people when the RSF captured it this week. About 26,000 fled the city on Sunday and Monday, according to UN agencies, but most are still trapped inside the famine-stricken city, without food or medical care, while relief supplies continue to be blocked.
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
A humanitarian agency, Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders), screened 165 children who fled from El Fasher last week and found that 75 per cent were acutely malnourished. “This shocking rate is a testament to the horror unfolding in El Fasher,” it said in a report.
About 130 survivors from El Fasher needed emergency hospital treatment after arriving this week in Tawila, about 50 kilometres from El Fasher, the agency said. There are widespread fears that Tawila – home to about 400,000 refugees − could be the next target for the RSF, which already controls almost all of Darfur.
After capturing El Fasher, the RSF executed a large number of injured patients in the Saudi hospital, one of the few remaining hospitals still functioning in the city, according to the El Fasher Resistance Committees, a civil society group. The Sudan Doctors Network reported that the RSF had abducted six health workers and demanded a ransom for their release.
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Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, in a brief statement on Tuesday, said Canada is “horrified by the attacks in El Fasher and condemns the reported mass killing of over 2,000 civilians.”
U.S. Senator Jim Risch, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said the RSF should be designated a terrorist organization. “The horrors in Darfur’s El Fasher were no accident – they were the RSF’s plan all along,” he said on Tuesday.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, said the only way to stop the massacres in Darfur is to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates, widely reported to be the main supplier of weapons and money to the RSF. A global boycott of music concerts and sporting events in the UAE could have an impact on the country’s support for the RSF, he told the media briefing on Tuesday.