A Year After El-Fasher Fell, Survivors Describe Fear, Hunger and a Fight to Erase the Evidence

A year after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, those who escaped the city say the violence has not ended. A woman identified as Hala, who uses a different name for security reasons, returned to the city three weeks ago from the Tawila refugee camp to collect documents, including her birth certificate and ID. She told the campaign group Avaaz that RSF fighters questioned her on arrival and issued a handwritten entry permit bearing her name, a signature and a date.

The day after she arrived, fighters spoke to her in the street with abusive language. She was not physically attacked, she said, only because other civilians were nearby. "There is no security in el-Fasher at all," Hala said, adding that women face sexual violence and anyone who refuses the group's demands can be beaten or tortured. She has since returned to Tawila and says she will not go back.

The RSF launched its final offensive on 26 October 2025, after a siege of more than 500 days. What followed was the largest single massacre of the war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces, which began in April 2023. Researchers at Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab said the speed and scale of the killing could only be compared to the Rwandan genocide. The UAE, which is accused of backing the RSF, continues to deny involvement.

Survivors described rapes, executions and the separation of men from women and children. Mohamed Hassan, from el-Fasher, said fighters fired on men and killed anyone they judged to be a soldier of the army or its allied Joint Forces. Close to 500 people were killed at the Saudi Maternity Hospital, where displaced families and medical staff had taken shelter. UN investigators also documented mass killings at el-Fasher University, on roads leading out of the city and at the berms the RSF had built around it.

The full toll may never be known. About 260,000 people were still inside the city when the assault began, and monitoring groups counted at least 6,000 dead in the first 72 hours using satellite imagery. The RSF has kept el-Fasher under a communications blackout and barred human rights investigators. This week in the North Kordofan town of Bara, 200 mass graves were found, and volunteers have recovered more than 600 bodies, most of them civilians whom witnesses say the RSF killed during the same October offensive.

Yale's researchers identified 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains between 26 October and 28 November 2025. Twenty showed signs of burning, and 57 vanished entirely within four weeks. RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, announced an investigation into what he called violations by his soldiers. When a UN team entered under close supervision in December, it called the city a crime scene, and one in six people screened had severe acute malnutrition.

The siege itself was devastating. A doctor who worked inside an el-Fasher hospital for almost two years said generators ran only two hours a night, emergency surgery was done by phone flashlight, and antibiotics and surgical gauze ran out. The World Food Programme reported that residents survived on animal fodder and food waste. In February, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the RSF committed acts of genocide in el-Fasher. The US government, Amnesty International and other rights groups have reached similar findings about Darfur.

Displacement continues. Tawila now hosts around 800,000 people, most from el-Fasher, and survivors say the RSF still detains fleeing men and demands ransoms of up to $3,000. Khadijah, an elderly woman originally from el-Geneina, said she now lives under a tree on a farm with little food and no shelter. Mudathir Mohammed Diqourni of an el-Fasher resistance committee said RSF militias are destroying farms and killing farmers in South and Central Darfur.

The UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe that private companies and recruiters based in the UAE routed weapons through Chad, southeastern Libya and Bosaso in Somalia. Mona Rishmawi, a member of the mission, said the supplies included weapons, drone-related equipment, logistical help and personnel. The United States remains the UAE's top weapons supplier, and British weaponry has been found on Sudanese battlefields.