Echoes of Darfur and Liberia in El Fasher violence

Hundreds of patients and staff massacred at a hospital; unarmed men of fighting age separated and shot at close range; civilians trying to flee, stripped of their belongings and extorted for ransom; perpetrators filming much of the violence themselves.

- Rachel Savage, Carlos Mureithi

The reports of atrocities that have emerged from the Sudanese city of El Fasher since it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last weekend follow a grimly familiar pattern.

In 2023, as many as 15,000 civilians, mostly from the non-Arab Masalit group, were killed in massacres in Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, as RSF and allied militias wrested control of the city.

Fighters went house to house on a killing rampage. Homes and camps for internally displaced people (IDP) were torched. In April this year, the RSF killed more than 1,500 civilians at Zamzam IDP camp in a span of 72 hours. The camp, south of El Fasher had a population of around 500,000. A Guardian investigation found testimony of ethnically-targeted slaughter, mass executions and large-scale abductions.

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by both massacres, with many still unaccounted for. Zamzam emptied out and many of its former inhabitants moved to El Fasher. Estimates of the numbers of dead since the RSF took El Fasher from the army on 26 October run into the thousands. The true number is not yet known.

Ever since the RSF began to lay siege to the city 18 months ago, NGOs and other observers of the war have been warning of an impending bloodbath. The nature of the RSF's attacks earlier in the war, they said, meant it was a matter of when, not if.

Sudan's civil war broke out when a power struggle between the armed forces led by Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF headed by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a former warlord known as Hemedti, erupted into violence in the capital Khartoum in April 2023. By the time of the conflict's second anniversary, 13m people had been displaced including 4m to neighbouring countries. Half of the country's population of 51m needed food aid. By many measures, it is the world's worst humanitarian crisis.