"This was predicted and predictable'

The RSF's rampage through El Fasher, where atrocities unfolded after the city fell, follows a bleak pattern seen in Rwanda, Liberia and Sudan itself-including a lack of international attention

- Rachel Savage and Carlos Mureithi

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.

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 month 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 72 hours. The camp, south of El Fasher, had a population of about 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.