On October 27, a video appeared on social media showing at least nine men sitting in a row next to a dirt road in the city of El Fasher in Sudan's Darfur region. Their thin wrists hang over their knees. They are exhausted and defeated, held captive by long-haired policemen in camouflage trousers, one of whom swings a whip over his head. Another, Alfateh Abdullah Idris, nicknamed Abu Lulu, accidentally begins firing a Kalashnikov at a number of prisoners. The last man, in a defensive reflex, bows his head and crosses his arms at the last second, but the bullets push him back and other militiamen join in, firing repeatedly at the corpses. Abu Lulu posted a video.
Abu Lulu holds the rank of brigadier general. Rapid Support Forcesa paramilitary group that has broken away from the Sudanese Armed Forces and has been fighting against them since April 2023 for control of Sudan, a gold-rich country in northeast Africa. On the day the video was published, Abu Lulu and other militants celebrated the capture of the city. The siege lasted five hundred days, more than three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad. The RSF used drones and artillery provided by the United Arab Emirates. In early May, the militia began building a thirty-five mile embankment around the city to prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering; Since then, people have survived on grass and animal feed. El Fasher had a population of one million when the RSF arrived. Two hundred and sixty thousand people were still living there at the end of October when the last members of the government forces began to leave the city, leaving it open to the RSF. The group distanced itself from Abu Lulu after the fall of the city and stated that he was arrested. Al Jazeera reported that he has since been released; he continued to post on social media.
“The world has not yet realized how important El Fasher is,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanities Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Raymond's team tracked atrocities in Sudan using satellite imagery NASA and commercial sources. teams analysis indicates that after the fall of El Fasher, the RSF carried out massacres. “In some cases, if someone gets shot while running and you photograph it from a satellite, it looks like a C or a J because they fall and fall to the ground on their knees or on their side in a fetal position,” Raymond told me. Satellite images show a large number of “C” and “J” letters, as well as blood stains visible from space. “It’s simple math,” he said. “We're talking about tens and tens of thousands of potential deaths in five days.” And the embankment, built to prevent aid from reaching El Fasher, now made it difficult to leave the city; Only thirty-five thousand people are known to have done this. Raymond's team now calls El Fasher Killbox.
Many of El Fasher's residents were members of non-Arab Sudanese ethnic minorities, which the RSF, whose core included nomadic Arabs, persecuted throughout the war. Fur and Zaghawa, Black Sudanese, were the first in the RSF's line of fire, although the militia also attacked members of other non-Arab factions such as Berti. Speaking by phone from Cairo, Altahir Hashim, a Sudanese human rights activist who helped set up a soup kitchen in El Fasher and distribute aid throughout Darfur, told me: “They are doing ethnic cleansing. They are killing, they are destroying.”
Throughout the last week of October, RSF fighters published videos of the killings. In one, they shout “God is great” over the corpses, waving victory signs and raising their rifles. In another case, they force men to dig their own graves. The RSF continues in many ways a tradition of mass atrocities. In the early 2000s, its predecessor militia known as the Janjaweed committed genocide About three hundred thousand people died in Darfur. Hashim and his family, who are members of the Zaghawas, were forced to flee to El Fasher. Two of his brothers were killed. “Nearly twenty-three years later, the genocide is still not over,” he told me. “The world just stood by and watched without taking any concrete action.”
