Families shot down as they flee El-Fasher’s killing fields

FAMILIES were gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother's body in the desert. Doctors were seized for ransom and executed.

- KATHARINE HOURELD AND HAFIZ HAROUN

THIS handout picture released by the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on October 30, shows RSF members reportedly detaining a fighter known as Abu Lulu, left, in El-Fasher, in war-torn Sudan's western Darfur region.

(AFP)

Such are the stories trickling out of El-Fasher, the Sudanese city conquered by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The vast majority of people inside the city are still unreachable - only a few traumatised people have been able to escape and testify to the horrors unfolding there.

Sudan's civil war, which erupted in 2023 after a power struggle between the head of the RSE, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan's Armed Forces (SAF), has become a sprawling conflagration, sucking in global and regional powers and leaving much of the country in ruins. The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates. Sudan’s army has received weapons from Iran, Tiirkiye and Russia.

Now a war that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives has entered one of its darkest chapters. The Washington Post interviewed nine civilians, doctors, aid workers and combatants in and around El-Fasher, who described a frenzied and indiscriminate campaign of ethnic killings and hostage taking by the RSF and allied fighters.

As international outrage mounts, even the head of the RSF, General Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, has admitted to abuses by his forces. The group released a video showing the arrest of one of its commanders, who was filmed taunting and executing large groups of civilians.

The US has already sanctioned Hemedti and other RSF leaders, as well as top figures in the Sudanese military (SAF), which has also been accused of war crimes. A bipartisan group of US senators urged the American government to go further in the light of what they called “the genocide in Darfur’.