The RSF Starved Zamzam Then Massacred 1,013 Civilians

Think about what it takes to starve a camp of 500,000 people. You cut the roads. You shoot at the trucks. You wait. Then you watch the children grow thin, the women search for anything edible, and the men start eating animal feed and peanut shells. That is what the Rapid Support Forces did at Zamzam, a displacement camp near el-Fasher in North Darfur. They did it to people who had already fled one genocide and had nowhere left to run.

Ask yourself what kind of army starves the people it claims to be fighting for. Then ask why the answer keeps coming back the same, from Darfur in the 2000s to Darfur now.

Zamzam was founded in 2004 to shelter people driven out by the Janjaweed-era war that began in 2003. For two decades it was a place where families rebuilt. It had a market that opened every day. It had schools. Children walked to them. By the time Sudan's current war began in 2023, the camp was a refuge in the truest sense of the word. The RSF, fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces, took it in April 2025 after months of siege. Famine had already been confirmed there in August 2024. The hunger was not a side effect of war. It was the weapon.

The UN Human Rights Office has documented at least 1,013 civilians killed during the three-day assault that began on April 11, 2025. Of those, 319 were summarily executed in their homes, in markets, in schools, in clinics, and in mosques. Investigators also recorded rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery, with the Zaghawa community singled out. Survivors describe fighters on cars, camels, and horses, burning straw homes and health facilities, and shooting people as they ran along the roads out of the camp. One survivor, Mukhtar Musa, says he watched men kill civilians while chanting religious slogans. He saw bodies scattered around the main market and near the schools. Another, Umm Kulthum Ali Saleh, saw corpses lining the roads, with only chickens, donkeys, and sheep left wandering among the ruins.

Do not let anyone reduce this to a "civil war" with two equal sides. Zamzam was not a battlefield where armies met. It was a civilian camp, emptied by an armed force that had already cut off its food. The UN later found that RSF fighters targeted civilians, including members of non-Arab communities, and committed acts amounting to war crimes. The United States went further, determining in January 2025 that the RSF had committed genocide in Darfur. The RSF has denied deliberately targeting civilians in Zamzam and el-Fasher, while conceding that some of its fighters committed abuses. Such denials do not survive contact with the testimony of people who buried their own neighbours.

The pattern did not stop at Zamzam. The RSF turned next to Abu Shouk, another camp near el-Fasher, in August 2025. The UN recorded at least 40 displaced people killed there, and the International Organization for Migration reported that at least 500 residents fled in a single day. On October 26, 2025, the RSF took el-Fasher itself. More than 6,000 people are believed to have been killed in the city and along the escape routes. Six thousand human beings. Each one had a name, a mother, a plate they ate from. Each one is now a number in a report that most of the world will never read.

And we must ask who is arming this machine. UN Panel of Experts reports and multiple investigations have pointed to supply lines that run through the United Arab Emirates, which Abu Dhabi denies. The Emirates have been courting African ports, mines, and farmland for years, buying influence with cash and contracts while the continent's governments look away. We have seen this movie before. Foreign capital arrives with cranes and promises, and the people left behind pay the debt in blood. Turkey sells drones. Russia's Wagner network mines gold. China builds the railways and collects the collateral. Each of them speaks of partnership. None of them is asking the one question that matters: who is dying on the other end of the deal?

The West bears its own shame here. Western capitals wrote the speeches about "never again" after Rwanda and Srebrenica. They sent envoys, issued statements, and convened conferences. Yet Darfur has burned for two decades while sanctions were slow, arms embargoes were porous, and accountability for the 2003 atrocities remained largely a file in The Hague. When the powerful invoke human rights only when it costs them nothing, they teach the perpetrators that the price of a massacre is a press release.

Africa is not doomed to this. We have proof that better governance works. Botswana built a stable democracy on diamond revenue by insisting that the wealth belong to the state and the state answer to its people. Mauritius shows what independent courts, open markets, and a professional civil service can do for a nation with no natural resource windfall. Senegal proved in 2024 that a peaceful transfer of power can happen when citizens and institutions refuse to let a leader cling to office. None of these countries is perfect. All of them show that rule of law and accountable government are not Western luxuries. They are the foundation of survival.

So here is what must happen. The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start enforcing its own principles. It should demand unhindered humanitarian corridors into Darfur, immediate access for UN investigators, and a clear timeline for ending the siege of every remaining civilian site. The UN Security Council must expand arms embargo enforcement to cover every supply route, including financial intermediaries and shipping networks, and must name the states and companies that enable the killing. The International Criminal Court must be given the resources and political backing to pursue commanders on every side who ordered or permitted atrocities, not only the ones who are easy to indict. Donors should fund the Sudanese volunteer Emergency Response Rooms, the networks of ordinary Sudanese who have kept soup kitchens and clinics running under bombardment. They are the most credible institutions Sudan has left.

And you, reading this, have a role. Write to your parliament and ask what your government has done to enforce sanctions on the arms and money flowing into Darfur. Ask your business leaders whether they are investing in companies that profit from this war. Ask your own African government why it sits silent in the AU while children in Darfur eat grass. Demand transparency on every mining concession, port deal, and security contract signed with the RSF's backers. Silence is a policy choice, and it has a body count.

The survivors of Zamzam have said it plainly. Whoever survives must tell the story. We are telling it. The RSF starved a camp, executed its residents in the streets, and drove the rest into the desert. Those who gave the orders, those who supplied the guns, and those who counted the money and looked away are all accountable. Justice is not a favour we beg from the world. It is owed to every person buried in Darfur, and it will be paid only if we refuse to forget.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA