People queue for food rations in a makeshift encampment near the town of Tawila in war-torn Sudan’s western Darfur region on April 13, 2025.-/AFP/Getty Images
Widespread reports of massacres and other atrocities are emerging from Darfur after a powerful Sudanese militia captured most of the famine-stricken city of El Fasher at the end of an 18-month siege.
Human rights groups have been predicting for many months that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) would begin executing non-Arab civilians if it captured the city where an estimated 260,000 people have been under siege. On Monday, evidence of the massacres was triggering alarm around the world.
Much of the evidence was contained in social-media videos posted online by the perpetrators themselves. The videos of brutal close-range executions by RSF gunmen were unverified, but were taken seriously by Sudan analysts, United Nations experts and foreign diplomats, all of whom expressed deep concern.
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
the globe and mail, Source: openstreetmap
“Civilians attempting to escape El Fasher are being gunned down by RSF as they flee,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, in a statement on Monday after talking to local civil society leaders.
“It is likely that thousands are being killed at the moment, and many thousands more are at risk if the RSF is not restrained,” he said. “Displaced people reaching Tawila today − a town west of Fasher, where there is some relief presence − report that massacres of civilians along ethnic lines have begun.”
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The Sudan Doctors Network, which has field teams in Darfur, said the number of unarmed civilians killed by the RSF in El Fasher “exceeds dozens.” It described the killings as a “heinous massacre” and “an act of ethnic cleansing.”
The network said the militia was also looting hospitals, clinics and pharmacies in the city. The UN Population Fund, UNFPA, said it had completely lost contact with the health workers who were running the last functioning maternity hospital in the city.
UN officials are among those who received reports of massacres. “Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters who accuse them of being SAF [Sudanese Armed Forces] fighters,” the office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a statement.
The executions seem to be ethnically targeted, it said. The largely Arab fighters of the RSF have committed massacres of non-Arab ethnic minorities since the beginning of the Sudan war in 2023, including the killing of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians in the Darfur city of El Geneina, the UN has previously reported.
Footage released on Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Telegram account on Oct. 26, 2025, show RSF fighters holding weapons and celebrating in the streets of El-Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan.-/AFP/Getty Images
Sudan’s government said the RSF was committing “brutal massacres, acts of killing, torture, looting, and plundering against defenceless civilians” in El Fasher and also in the town of Bara, in North Kordofan state, which the RSF captured on the weekend.
El Fasher was largely cut off from the outside world on Monday. Dozens of volunteers who worked in the city’s community kitchens were feared dead as a result of RSF executions, according to reports by the North Darfur Emergency Rooms Council and the El Fasher Resistance Committees.
One unverified video seemed to show RSF soldiers chasing a group of fleeing women outside the city. “Given past realities in North Darfur, the likelihood of sexual violence against women and girls in particular is extremely high,” the UN human rights office said in its statement.
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The RSF, which has been battling Sudan’s army since the beginning of the war, captured the main army base in El Fasher on Sunday. It continued to gain control of other key sectors of the city on Monday, including the airport, and appeared to have complete dominance of the city, analysts said.
El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, was the last remaining city outside the RSF’s control in the Darfur region of western Sudan. The RSF built a 57-kilometre earthen wall around the entire city this year, cutting off its food supply. As the siege tightened, it attacked the city with drone strikes and artillery shelling, and reportedly executed civilians who tried to leave or enter the city.
Famine has been officially declared at several sites around the city. Even before the RSF captured the city, an average of three children had been dying every day in El Fasher from starvation, disease and lack of health care, according to Razan Al-Mahdi, spokesperson for the Sudan Doctors Network.
In recent weeks, thousands of civilians from El Fasher have reached the town of Tawila, about 50 kilometres away, where about 400,000 displaced people have already taken refuge. But only half of their basic needs are being met, and families are living in overcrowded makeshift shelters, the International Rescue Committee says.
“People arriving from El Fasher are coming from what can only be described as a hellscape, a city torn apart by conflict, destruction and despair,” said Arjan Hehenkamp, the IRC director in Darfur. “They come with nothing but the clothes on their backs, severely traumatized, looking for safety and support.”
Since 2023, the war in Sudan has become the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, with about 12 million people forced from their homes and an estimated death toll in the hundreds of thousands.
A Sudanese paramilitary force is battling the last pockets of resistance in a Darfur city that has endured a brutal 18-month siege and where a full takeover would entrench a geographical division of the country between rival military factions.
Reuters