El Fashir Massacre: How RSF Militia turned Darfur into a killing field

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OPINION

By Mohamed Osman Akasha, PhD: International Security

The Terrorist Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia has been besieging the city of El Fashir for almost two years, during which the people of this historic city bore the brunt of the indiscriminate artillery shelling, drone attacks, starvation and destruction of hospitals.

When the genocidal militia intensified its notorious shelling using chemical agents, mainly Sarin gas, the Sudanese Armed Forces decided to withdraw from the city to prevent further mayhem and harm to the inhabitants of El Fashir. The infamous militia entered the city of El Fashir, capital of North Darfur, on 26 October 2025. What followed was mass extermination, a premeditated slaughter of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and an orgy of violence that resembles one of the most brutal genocides on the globe.

The RSF militia, descended from the Janjaweed militias, bombarded El Fashir with all types of lethal weapons and Sarin gas shells. Survivors describe fighters opening fire on fleeing families, dragging men from homes, and raping women in the open. Hospitals, markets, and displacement camps became hunting grounds for RSF militia death squads.

From Siege to Genocide

For months before that, El Fashir was a city under siege, starved, bombarded, and encircled by the militia, artillery and drones. The Washington Post reported that residents were “reduced to eating leaves and animal feed” as RSF militia forces blocked aid and bombed water supplies (Washington Post, Sept 2025). When they entered the city, the siege became slaughter.

Over 2,000 unarmed civilians were executed in two days (26–27 Oct 2025), many shot in their homes or burned alive in shelters. The UN Human Rights Office verified dozens of summary executions and warned of “a pattern of ethnically targeted violence” (UN OHCHR, Oct 2025).

Earlier in the year, RSF militia bombardments on El Fashir and the Abu Shouk displacement camp killed more than 180 civilians in less than a month. Satellite imagery released by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International showed entire districts, hospitals, and marketplaces reduced to ash, mirroring the RSF’s militia scorched-earth operations in West Darfur. Even hospitalised patients who were not able to flee were killed inside hospitals in El Fashir.

“A Horror Beyond Words”: UN Condemnation

During the UN Security Council briefing on 30 October 2025, Marta Ama Akyaa Pobee, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Africa, issued a stark warning: “The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias are believed to have carried out mass killings of civilians in El Fashir, summary executions during house-to-house searches, and shootings of families trying to flee. Reports received by the UN Human Rights Office indicate that these attacks were targeted along ethnic lines. The situation is simply horrifying.” (UN Security Council Briefing, 30 Oct 2025).

Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, condemned “appalling reports of summary executions, ethnic targeting, and sexual violence by RSF,” warning that “the risk of large-scale, ethnically motivated atrocities in El Fashir is mounting by the day.”

The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, through OCHA, described El Fashir as “a city under siege, under attack, civilians unable to flee, hospitals looted, aid blocked,” and urged the RSF to “open safe corridors and cease attacks on civilians.”

The UK Ambassador to the UN, James Kariuki, added: “Reports of atrocities, including targeted killings, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence by the RSF are horrifying. The world will hold the RSF leadership accountable for the crimes committed by their forces.”

That same day, the UN Security Council issued a formal statement condemning the RSF assault, expressing “grave concern at the heightened risk of atrocities, including ethnically motivated violence,” and demanding unrestricted humanitarian access and accountability.

International Condemnation and Global Outrage

The atrocities in El Fashir have triggered an unprecedented wave of international condemnation. The United Nations, African Union, and European Union each issued statements denouncing the militia of RSF’s actions as “barbaric,” “indiscriminate,” and “possibly genocidal.”

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany jointly called on the RSF to immediately cease attacks on civilians, warning that commanders and foreign sponsors “will be held responsible for these crimes.” The U.S. State Department described the assault as “a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing,” while the European Union External Action Service condemned the “systematic targeting of ethnic minorities and humanitarian workers.”

The African Union Peace and Security Council also voiced alarm at the “massacres and ethnic persecution” unfolding in El Fashir, urging regional states to halt all logistical and financial support to the RSF. International NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Médecins Sans Frontières, have echoed those calls, documenting “credible evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the RSF militia.” Despite these appeals, the terrorist RSF militia continues to defy international law, emboldened by the silence or complicity of regional backers.

On April 19, 2024, Senators Cardin and Risch, along with Representatives McCaul and Meeks, sent a formal letter to President Joe Biden asking for a determination under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act as to whether the RSF and its commander (Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka “Hemedti”) had engaged in “gross violations of internationally recognised human rights”. The letter pointed to the December 6, 2023, determination by Antony Blinken (US Secretary of State) that the RSF had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

On October 30, 2025, U.S. Senators Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), in their capacities as Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Senators Tim Scott (R-SC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Todd Young (R-IN), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), published a joint statement calling for the U.S. to “consider the designation of the RSF as a potential Foreign Terrorist Organisation or Specially Designated Global Terrorist organisation”. The statement explicitly references the RSF’s role in the assault on El Fashir (El-Fashir) in Darfur, describing it as a “long-predicted ethnically targeted assault on the civilian population” and stating that the U.S. must act.

Rape as a Weapon of War

The desecration of El Fashir unleashed a wave of systematic sexual violence. Health workers and rights monitors documented over 100 cases of rape between January and October 2025, committed by terrorist RSF fighters against women from the Zaghawa, Fur, and Berti ethnic groups (Sudan Tribune, Mar 2025).

A confidential Darfur24 report details that in March, RSF fighters attacked villages west of El Fashir, killing 30 civilians, raping four women, and displacing 50,000 families. The UN Special Adviser on the

Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, warned that “the scale and pattern of attacks by RSF on ethnic communities in El Fashir may amount to genocidal acts” (UN Press, Oct 2025).

Ethnic Cleansing by Design

The militia of RSF’s brutality follows a deliberate pattern. Survivors recount door-to-door executions, forced expulsions from Zaghawa and Berti neighbourhoods, and the torching of IDP camps where many ethnic groups had sheltered since 2003.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan concluded that the RSF and its allied militias committed murder, torture, sexual slavery, and persecution “with ethnic, gender, and political motivations.” (UN Sudan, Oct 2025)

The humanitarian toll is staggering: over 600,000 civilians remain trapped without food, medicine, or clean water (OCHA, Oct 2025). Aid convoys are blocked or looted; by the Janjaweed of RSF, who emptied entire warehouses in El Fashir and Nyala.

Hospitals have been destroyed, doctors executed, and humanitarian workers abducted, part of what analysts describe as a strategy of annihilation aimed at erasing other ethnic groups in North Darfur.

The UAE’s Silent Partnership in Atrocity

Besides the unrefutable substantiated evidence presented to the UNSC by the government of Sudan, countless evidence confirmed the United Arab Emirates' sponsorship of the RSF’s war machine. Investigations by The New York Times, CNN, and The Guardian reveal that UAE-funded cargo planes and drones reached RSF strongholds in Chad and Darfur via covert routes. These weapons, later documented by the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, were used in drone strikes that killed civilians in El Fashir (NYT, Dec 2024; CNN, Sept 2024).

Despite official denials, Emirati arms and fuel shipments persisted even as RSF militia massacres escalated, making the UAE a de facto accomplice in what human-rights experts increasingly describe as a genocide.

Western diplomats and UN investigators warn that continued external financing and resupply are enabling the RSF militia to prolong its campaign of extermination, despite the UN arms embargo.

A Crime Without Consequence

El Fashir’s is not an isolated tragedy, it is a mirror of the world’s failure. The militia of Janjaweed has been rebranded; the same militia, now wearing uniforms and associated with drones instead of horses, is annihilating the same people.

As UN officials warn of genocide and humanitarian agencies unearth mass graves, the international community faces a stark moral choice: act decisively to hold the RSF militia and its backers accountable, or accept complicity through silence.

If impunity prevails again, El Fashir will not only be remembered as the city that fell, but as the place where humanity surrendered its conscience.

The writer is Charge' d'Affaires of the Republic of Sudan in Kenya