IN one video, dozens of bodies lie strewn on the floor of a building as militiamen move through, checking that no one is still alive. A man in a white jalabiya – seemingly the only survivor – is shot dead. “Finished,” a fighter says in Arabic as they walk out.
In another video, fighters stand in a trench, guns raised, shouting cries of victory. All around them lie corpses in the sand, as vehicles burn in the distance – presumably vehicles that those people had tried to use to escape.
In a third video, a different group of fighters force six men to lie face down on the ground. A captive is kicked in the head, as the group are called slaves and ordered to bleat like sheep.
Communication networks are down in the Darfur city of El Fasher, making it hard for journalists and human rights defenders like me to document what has happened since the paramilitary-turned-rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized control over the weekend.
But a deluge of shocking videos – mostly filmed and posted online by RSF fighters – along with satellite images, point to mass killings on a devastating scale that could be the worst yet seen in Sudan’s more than two-and-a-half-year war.
Civil society groups believe thousands of people have been killed over recent days, including nearly 500 at the city’s only partially functioning hospital. The killings have been so extensive that blood and dead bodies are now visible from space.
Many who escaped the massacres have been kidnapped by the RSF and affiliated camel-riding and motorbike-riding militiamen who profit from despair. I have spoken to several people who have been bankrupted as they try to pay ransom fees to release relatives.
The fall of El Fasher means all of Darfur’s main cities are now under the control of the RSF – a force composed largely of Darfuri Arab fighters that succeeded the Janjaweed militias responsible for the mass killings of non-Arab Darfuris in the 2000s.
The capture cements the de facto partition of Sudan, which is experiencing the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, between RSF-held and army-held regions.
But neither the RSF’s control nor its announcement of a rival administration makes it a legitimate government. It does not serve civilians and support schools and hospitals; it rules through brute force and extracts resources from a now-exhausted population.
Warnings ignored
What makes matters worse is that the crimes committed in El Fasher were long telegraphed and long foreseen: For more than 500 days, the RSF subjected the city to a brutal siege in an attempt to dislodge the national army – supported by allied armed groups – from its last major holdout in Darfur.
Nearly 300,000 civilians who remained in the city were falsely branded as collaborators of anti-RSF forces, sealing a fate that was obvious given the RSF’s atrocities in other parts of Darfur and across Sudan.
Yet warnings were unheeded, civilians were left defenceless, and the RSF’s main patron – the United Arab Emirates – continued to receive arms (including from many Western nations) even as it passed them on to a genocidal militia.
In the days before the city’s fall, several groups of army personnel left their base – coordinating and paying RSF fighters to ensure safe passage – according to my sources. Hunger and the RSF’s increased use of drones had forced them to fold.
Egged on by an international diaspora of hateful RSF TikTokers and seeking revenge for fellow fighters who were killed in the battle for El Fasher, the RSF soon began its appalling rampage.
The videos circulating widely online – some verified by open-source investigators and human rights defenders – show fighters revelling in their actions and humiliating victims with dehumanising and supremacist language.
Some Darfuris are now watching massacre videos and discovering that their family members are among the casualties, or seeing missing relatives in footage showing large groups of people who have been detained.
The crimes of Abu Lulu
Several videos show an individual known as Abu Lulu – a lionised RSF fighter whose real name is Brigadier General Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris – travelling from place to place, mercilessly executing people.
Many of Abu Lulu’s victims were killed in a trench that had been dug by the RSF earlier this year around El Fasher to tighten the siege. Wearing a white scarf, he can be seen posing among corpses, grinning and holding his gun aloft.
“Look at all these people I killed,” he tells a man lying in a ditch in one video. A fellow RSF fighter says the man is wounded and suggests clemency, but Abu Lulu refuses. “I will not give you any mercy, I will not forgive you,” he says, before shooting him dead.
“Hemedti is the best,” he says to a line of people in another video, referring to the RSF’s leader. The people say the words back, but it doesn’t spare them. “I don’t want to waste my time with you,” Abu Lulu says as he shoots them one by one.
However shocking, it should be remembered that these are just the videos that have reached us so far. When you think of the many massacres that weren’t published, you get a sense of the scale of the atrocities that have taken place.
That the RSF have filmed itself engaging so openly in atrocity crimes demonstrates the profound lack of accountability that has accompanied the group throughout this conflict, and long before it.
Still, those being filmed, like Abu Lulu, remain relatively small fish. Top commanders, including Abdul Rahim Dagalo, the RSF deputy leader, are currently present and overseeing operations in El Fasher, and they must be held accountable for the actions of their fighters.
It is RSF commanders who have also allowed individuals like Abu Lulu to stay on the front lines, even as he has been documented committing abuses in El Fasher for many months, and before that in Khartoum and the Kordofans.
It is also the RSF’s top leadership that had directed the shelling of El Fasher for 18 months while denying humanitarian agencies access to the city and nearby camps – a siege that led to widespread famine conditions.
In the weeks before the city fell, I heard from one woman who said the animal feed (ambaz) that people were relying on had become too expensive, that mutual aid groups were on their knees, and that water was so restricted that people had stopped bathing.
The only bits of food remaining, the woman said, were the seeds of a tree that people never used to eat. More bitter than lemon, you have to soak them in water for a week to remove the taste.
Profiting from misery
Some of those who survived Abu Lulu’s bullets and other RSF killers are now walking along the road towards Tawila, the main town that has been receiving El Fasher’s displaced in recent months.
But the passage is stalked by RSF fighters and allied militias, who run trafficking networks to Tawila, and who loot, abduct, and kill those who don’t pay. Families split up and try different routes to maximise the chance that at least somebody will survive.
Those I spoke to in recent days who made the journey successfully described seeing scores of dead bodies along the way: some shot by militiamen, others dying from wounds inflicted by the RSF in El Fasher, and others from hunger and thirst.
One man said the journey took him three days, and that he avoided RSF-affiliated groups by travelling at night. He said he passed groups of women and children who were too exhausted to keep moving.
For the RSF, war is also about financial gain. The siege was not just in place for military reasons; RSF fighters profited by smuggling food into El Fasher, charging traders who were doing the same, and taking a cut to facilitate people’s exits.
Another woman said she left for Tawila a day before the RSF took control of El Fasher – a stroke of luck, she said, because it meant there were fewer armed men on the roads as they were all heading towards the city.
Still, in Tawila – which is now hosting hundreds of thousands of people – she said she has no food or shelter. During the day, she uses her clothes and a blanket to create a makeshift cover from the sun; at night, they become her mattress and duvet.
“I don’t want to stay here forever,” she said, adding that thousands of people are arriving every day in an even worse state, having suffered far more on the journey.
I also spoke to one person who said three relatives who took different routes to Tawila were all separately captured by militiamen since the weekend. The family then received messages demanding thousands of dollars.
People have already lost everything during the siege, and yet the RSF and affiliated militias are somehow turning their flight for survival into a form of profit.
It is a reminder that, for the RSF, war is also about financial gain. The siege was not just in place for military reasons; RSF fighters profited by smuggling food into El Fasher, charging traders who were doing the same, and taking a cut to facilitate people’s exits.
International solidarity needed
It is not lost on me that these killings took place just as the RSF was participating in US-sponsored talks that some expected would produce a three-month nationwide ceasefire.
This is not the first time the RSF has launched offensives and committed horrific abuses against civilians while taking part in supposed peace negotiations, which it uses as political cover.
The message the group is sending to the international community is unmistakable: we can sit with you at the table, but our killing machine will keep running – and you will still say we are interested in peace.
As we watch events in El Fasher, many of us have given up on the illusion of international protection. The UN and the African Union have proved unwilling or unable to act; their mechanisms crippled by the interests of powerful states.
The message the group is sending to the international community is unmistakable: we can sit with you at the table, but our killing machine will keep running.
What we need now is international solidarity – ordinary people, civil movements, and rights defenders who are willing to confront the governments and companies complicit in this war.
That means calling out the UAE for funding and arming the RSF, exposing the Western governments that continue to trade with it, and taking action against the companies whose weapons and vehicles are turning up on Darfur’s killing fields.
If nothing is done, Darfur will continue to burn, which, for those who have survived RSF attacks, is unthinkable. As the woman who arrived in Tawila just before the RSF seized El Fasher told me: “I would rather die than go through this again.”
Edited by Philip Kleinfeld.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
