The RSF Wiped Out El Fasher and the World Looked Away

Before the siege, El Fasher was a city of at least 300,000 people. Today, by the most careful estimates, between 40,000 and 60,000 people have returned or come and go, living among the rubble of a city that was erased in plain sight. Those are the numbers. Behind each one is a family that did not come back.

On 26 October 2025, after 500 days of siege, the Rapid Support Forces took El Fasher. The RSF has fought Sudan's army since April 2023, and its commanders did not hide their intentions. They pledged to "cleanse" the city. They named the communities they wanted gone: the Zaghawa, the Fur, and other non-Arab peoples of Darfur. This was not a military objective. It was a declaration of ethnic elimination, and the RSF carried it out.

Ask yourself what it takes to make a city disappear. It takes killing people in their homes and on the roads they fled along. It takes sexual violence used as a weapon against women and girls who had nowhere to run. It takes starving a population for more than a year and then executing the ones who try to leave. International investigators have documented exactly this: mass killings, sexual violence, and atrocities that meet the threshold of crimes the world swore after Rwanda and Srebrenica it would never allow again. The world swore it. The world is still counting.

The Evidence

The International Organisation for Migration estimates that nearly 100,000 people managed to flee El Fasher. Think about that. A hundred thousand people walked, crawled, or bargained their way out of a death trap. Many of them carried nothing but their children. Thousands more are still missing. Some died on the road, of thirst, of gunfire, of exhaustion. Others were captured by the RSF and have simply vanished from the record. Every missing person is a mother who is still waiting, a father who is still searching hospital lists, a child whose name nobody has bothered to write down.

The RSF did not emerge from nowhere. Its roots run back to the Janjaweed militias that the Sudanese state armed and unleashed in Darfur in the early 2000s, the same campaign that produced the International Criminal Court's first case against a sitting head of state. Two decades later, the same playbook is being run again, this time by a force with a commander who has grown rich on gold and now commands tens of thousands of fighters. Credible reporting and UN experts have also alleged that foreign suppliers, including the United Arab Emirates, have funneled weapons and money to the RSF. The UAE denies these allegations. But the question every African should ask is simple: when the weapons arrive in a city where children are dying of hunger, who answers for them?

Let us be precise, because precision is what separates evidence from propaganda. The Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are not innocent. The army has its own record of abuses across Sudan, and its alliance with Islamist militias has made the country's civil war more brutal, not less. Any honest account of this war must name every party that commits atrocities. But El Fasher's fall was not a battle lost. It was a campaign of ethnic cleansing executed by a paramilitary force that announced its target in advance and then hit it.

The Context

Sudan has been trapped in cycles of violence for generations, and every cycle has taught the same lesson to the powerful: that impunity is cheap. Darfur's genocide in the 2000s produced indictments, resolutions, and promises. Few perpetrators faced trial. The men who ran the militias became ministers, generals, and business partners. Impunity is not an accident of Sudanese politics. It is a choice made again and again by governments, arms dealers, and foreign patrons who decided that Sudanese lives were a cost of doing business.

Meanwhile, the scramble for Africa has not slowed. Gold from Sudan's mines moves through networks that stretch to Dubai and beyond. Russia's Wagner Group has been tied to mining concessions across the Sahel and Central Africa, trading security services for resources. China, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are all competing for influence, ports, minerals, and arms contracts across the continent. These are different actors from the European powers that carved up Africa in 1884, but the logic is familiar. Outside powers come for what is under the ground and what is in the hands of whoever holds the guns. And the people who bleed are always the ones who never got a seat at the table.

We, as Africans, must stop accepting the story that these wars are too complicated to understand. El Fasher was not complicated. It was a city, a people, and a deliberate plan. The complexity is a shield that the guilty hide behind.

The Solutions

Accountability is the first demand, and it is not negotiable. The ICC has had jurisdiction over Darfur since the Security Council referred the situation in 2005. Twenty years later, the court must be given the resources, the cooperation, and the political backing to pursue commanders at every level of the RSF and the Sudanese army, and to trace the financiers who keep these forces armed. Impunity ends when the cost of atrocity becomes personal: frozen accounts, travel bans, and prosecutions that reach the boardrooms and bank accounts that make mass violence possible.

The second demand is to choke the supply lines. The UN arms embargo on Darfur must be enforced with real monitoring, real inspections of cargo flights and shipments, and real penalties for any state or company that breaks it. Governments that arm paramilitaries in exchange for gold should be named publicly and sanctioned. Trade is a privilege, and a government that finances ethnic cleansing forfeits it.

The third demand is for a genuine civilian-led political transition, one that gives Sudanese citizens, including the displaced and the diaspora, a real voice. Botswana has shown for decades that a country can build wealth on the back of strong institutions, transparent resource management, and peaceful transfers of power. Mauritius has proven that small, diverse African states can thrive under rule of law and free markets. Senegal has twice demonstrated that democratic alternation is possible when citizens refuse to let leaders cling to power. Sudan's pro-democracy movement has already shown the courage to organize under fire, through neighborhood resistance committees and emergency response rooms that kept people alive when the state abandoned them. Those are the building blocks of a Sudan worth fighting for: independent courts, property rights, a free press, and an army that answers to a civilian government rather than to militia warlords.

The African Union has a responsibility it has too often shirked. The AU suspended Sudan after the 2021 coup, but suspension without consequence is theater. The Peace and Security Council should adopt concrete benchmarks for the protection of civilians, support independent investigators, and back humanitarian access to El Fasher and the surrounding region. The UN Security Council, for its part, should stop hiding behind procedural delays and act on the evidence already documented by its own investigators.

The Call to Action

Here is what we demand, and here is what you can do. Demand that the UN Security Council refer fresh evidence of El Fasher's crimes to the ICC and back it with sanctions on every individual and company implicated. Demand that the AU Peace and Security Council publish a timeline for protecting civilians and funding humanitarian corridors into El Fasher. Demand that your own government stop trading with, or quietly funding, any actor that sells weapons into Darfur. Contact your representatives. Put these questions to your foreign ministers. Share the names of the cities that were erased, because a massacre that no one remembers is a massacre that will be repeated.

The people of El Fasher did not choose this war. They chose to survive it, and many of them did not. The 40,000 to 60,000 who have returned are rebuilding with their hands, in ruins, under threat, without the protection they were promised. They deserve more than our sympathy. They deserve our pressure, our memory, and our refusal to look away.

Africa will not be free until its people are no longer treated as expendable. El Fasher is the test. Will we remember it, or will we let the world forget?

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL