The RSF Emptied El Fasher and Handed Its Homes to Strangers

One year ago, the Rapid Support Forces took El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, after 500 days of siege. Today the city is a graveyard of standing walls. Pockets of houses remain, and between them the streets are empty. Thousands of people are still missing, and no one has been held to account.

Ask yourself what it takes to make a city of 300,000 people disappear. It takes an armed group that pledged to "cleanse" the city and meant it. The RSF did not merely conquer El Fasher. It set out to erase the people who lived there, and the Zaghawa and Fur communities were its declared targets. The United Nations estimates that some 6,000 people were killed. Researchers studying satellite imagery believe the true toll runs into the tens of thousands. Those are not abstractions. They are mothers who never came home, fathers buried in unmarked ground, and children who will grow up without knowing the names of their grandparents' streets.

The International Organisation for Migration counts nearly 100,000 people who managed to flee. Many of those who did not escape are still unaccounted for. Some died on the roads out of the city. Others were captured. Among the captured were soldiers' families, teachers, doctors, journalists, and civil society activists, all of them guilty of nothing more than existing in a city the RSF wanted emptied.

Now look at what has replaced them. Solidarités International estimates that between 40,000 and 60,000 people have returned or move in and out of El Fasher, against a pre-war population of at least 300,000. Survivors say the homes of the displaced are being given to newcomers, many of them from nomadic Arab tribes that supply the RSF's leadership and most of its fighters. Some of these newcomers are reportedly being issued documents claiming ownership of houses they have never lived in, then filmed for propaganda videos announcing that El Fasher has "returned." Salwa, who was born in that city, put it plainly: these people will never leave. This is not reconstruction. It is demographic engineering, carried out with bulldozers, forged paperwork, and a camera.

The machinery of this crime does not stop at the city limits. In Dagris prison outside Nyala, human rights organisations counted between 13,000 and 19,500 detainees earlier this year. The facility's official capacity is 4,500. Detainees are packed into cells where they go weeks without seeing sunlight. Cholera and dengue are spreading. Mortality has risen sharply, and families are not even told when their relatives die. Ransom is routine. Ibrahim, a journalist with El Fasher Radio and Television, was released after nine months, sick and blind in one eye, once his family paid $2,000. Doctors in the Sudan Doctors Network estimate that 73 medical personnel are being held in Dagris and Kober. Those are the people who would have treated the wounded. The RSF has jailed them.

We must be honest about the wider war, because honesty is the only thing that makes accountability possible. The conflict between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces has raged since April 2023, and the army is no clean hero. Its own record of indiscriminate bombardment, detention, and abuse has left civilians with no safe side to stand on. Survivors told reporters they feel they have "no option" but the army, and that is an indictment of both armed camps. When two militaries fight over a country while its people pay with their lives, the people are the only ones who never signed up for the war.

Why should a South African, a Kenyan, or a Ghanaian care about a city 4,000 miles away? Because El Fasher is the template. Every despot who wants to hold power by force is watching what the RSF has gotten away with. Impunity is contagious. The same logic that allows a city to be emptied and repopulated by proxy is the logic that lets a coup leader keep his prisoners and a warlord keep his ransoms. When the world shrugs at El Fasher, it teaches every armed group on this continent that civilians are a resource to be seized, relocated, or sold back to their families. Who benefits from this silence? The men with guns and the foreign backers who keep their supply lines open. Who bleeds? The mothers, the teachers, and the children of Darfur.

We know what the solution looks like, because Africa has already proven it works. Botswana built its prosperity on institutions that protect property, respect elections, and punish corruption. Mauritius turned itself from a sugar island into a stable, rule-of-law economy through investment in transparent governance. Senegal showed that a peaceful transfer of power is possible when citizens and courts insist on it. None of these countries is perfect, but each understands the basic truth that a state without accountable institutions is just an armed gang with a flag.

So here is what must happen. The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start demanding action: an independent, funded investigation into the El Fasher atrocities, with forensic access to mass graves and satellite records made public. The UN Security Council must refer the crimes to the International Criminal Court and impose targeted sanctions on the RSF leadership and anyone financing its war. Every state that sells arms or supplies money to any party in this conflict must be named, and its complicity exposed. Humanitarian corridors must be opened under neutral monitoring, not under the authority of a parallel government that calls itself a state while it jails doctors. Property must be restored to its rightful owners, and those who were handed stolen homes must be removed. Prisoners held without charge must be released or brought before independent courts. The Sudanese people must be given a path back to a civilian, democratic government, because no military, however it dresses itself, has earned the right to rule without the consent of the governed.

And you, reader, are not a spectator. Write to your parliament and demand that your government name the RSF's atrocities and press for sanctions. Pressure your national media to report on Dagris, El Fasher, and Kordofan, where the UN has warned that the same horror could repeat itself. Support the journalists, doctors, and humanitarian workers who are risking their lives to document what is happening, and share their reporting until no one can claim they did not know. Demand that the AU stop hiding behind the word "concern" and start using the word "accountability."

El Fasher is not a distant tragedy. It is a warning, and it is a test. We can look away and let the RSF's model of conquest, forgery, and ransom become normal. Or we can insist that the people of Darfur are Africans whose lives, homes, and dignity matter as much as anyone's. The city is still standing. Its people are still alive in Dagris, still searching for their families, still waiting for someone to say their names. Let us be the ones who answer.

Based on reporting by RFI