A true genocide’: at least 1,500 people’ in Sudan’s el-Fasher
Regional countries express alarm as more evidence emerges of mass killings by paramilitary forces in el-Fasher.
Scores of people have been killed in attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) during their recent capture of the city of el-Fasher in Sudan’s western Darfur region, according to a medical group and researchers.
The RSF, which has been fighting Sudan’s military for control of the country, killed at least 1,500 people over the past three days as civilians tried to flee the besieged city, the Sudan Doctors Network said on Wednesday. The group, which tracks the country’s civil war, described the situation as “a true genocide”.
“The massacres the world is witnessing today are an extension of what occurred in el-Fasher more than a year and a half ago, when over 14,000 civilians were killed through bombing, starvation, and extrajudicial executions,” the group said.
It said the attacks are being carried out as part of a “deliberate and systematic campaign of killing and extermination”.
The statement comes as new evidence of mass killings in the strategic area has emerged from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which reported that satellite imagery of el-Fasher, taken after the RSF moved in, shows clusters of objects consistent with the size of human bodies, as well as large areas of red discolouration on the ground.
The RSF has been locked in a bloody civil war with Sudan’s army since 2023, in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 12 million people.
The paramilitary force overran el-Fasher, the army’s last stronghold in Darfur, on Sunday after 17 months of siege.
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