The mass killings began instantly when Al-Fashir city, the capital of North Darfur state and the historical capital of the Darfur region, fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force at war with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), but most importantly, with the people of Sudan, since April 2023. Videos recorded by RSF soldiers show people running with the little energy they have preserved after months of starvation due to living under RSF siege only to be chased and shot by young soldiers who give the videos titles such as “the season of hunting rabbits”. In another video, we can hear an RSF soldier telling his friend to speed up the four-by-four truck to reach the women and girls at the front of the crowd fleeing the city on foot with barely nothing to show of the long lives they’ve lived in the city. Two viral videos show the RSF degrading Muammar Ibrahim, a respected young journalist and a correspondent of Al-Jazeera in Al-Fashir after they captured him. Another video shows the RSF mistreating a corpse of a woman who is likely to be Siham Hassan Hasaballah, the youngest Parliamentarian in the history of Sudan, we can clearly see her broken hand and the RSF soldiers taunting her corpse saying “get up if you can!”.
The RSF, a nickname for the Janjaweed or ‘devil on horseback’, have a long history of atrocities in the Darfur region can be traced back to the 2003 Darfur conflict, when they carried out campaigns of mass killing, rape and ethnic cleansing. Their handler at the time, Ali Abdelrahman Kushaib was found guilty by the ICC on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity a few weeks ago. The Janjaweed were rebranded in 2013 and granted a semi-formal status as supporting forces under the National Intelligence Security Service (NISS).
In 2017, the Rapid support forces law was passed by El-Bashir’s parliament endorsing them as an independent force that was under the supervision of president Elbashir himself to help secure his grip on power for more years. Since the dawn of their existence the Janjaweed worked with complete impunity, and they faced no accountability for their atrocities. Additionally, the Khartoum Process operations, funded by the EU, helped in empowering the RSF to build financial independence to what is now known as the Daglo Empire away from Elbashir, as they projected their ability to fight illegal immigration through Sudan to the Libyan desert and to Europe, their contribution to these operations enabled them to be viewed as useful actors in Sudan and gave them an escape card to avoid accountability from the international community.
For 20 years, the people of Darfur were forced to normalise with their murderers to be subjected to the same atrocities by the same perpetrator once again in the absence of serious international action. Al-Bashir’s rule fell in 2019, but the RSF managed to rebrand themselves once again as part of the revolution and their leader continued to be a force in the transitional government.
The international community has acknowledged that the Masalit, a tribe indigenous to West Darfur, were targeted with ethnically-based killings in 2023, however, the level of violence in the rest of the region was barely amplified.
Al-Fashir was a city in defiance, its people fought hard for their land, their life and the lives of the people they love, knowing that the RSF would turn their beautiful town to a hell-hole. They fought against daily bombardments by the RSF, they persisted when most of the hospitals in the town were bombed to the ground and were declared out-of-service and they survived under the most extreme kind of famine, a man-made famine caused by a siege imposed by the RSF.
During this siege, food was not allowed into the town and anyone trying to smuggle food into the town was tortured or shot down on sight in cold blood. In the meantime, children died en masse with a rate of 3 children daily as reported by the Sudanese Doctors Syndicate, and adults sustained themselves on animal feed, leather and things that no human should eat.
Famine and daily bombardment were never enough for the RSF, following the fall of the city and the withdrawal of SAF, civilians have been subjected to what we believe is targeted ethnic cleansing as communities were killed based on their ethnicity and color. RSF accounts joke that Abu-Lulu, an RSF officer known for filming his executions with a smile on his face, counted over a thousand executions and had to repeat his killing spree because he lost count. We believe that the ongoing massacres happening in Al-Fashir could amount to genocide because the killings are very intentional and will precisely lead to demographic change.
We are distressed about the situation in Al-Fashir, the last resisting city in Western Sudan.
We are concerned because many of us have family and friends who are there, and also because the fall of Al-Fashir gives the RSF total control of the Darfur region, isolating it from the rest of Sudan and further deepening the administrative secession between Western Sudan and the rest of the country. Due to RSF and its political arm, the Apartheid government of Tasees, Sudan is at risk of disintegrating into several countries, risking further civilian displacement and the loss of dear civilian lives.
Since then, the city has also witnessed a total communications blackout, making information very difficult and making some of our members very worried about the fate of their families and friends. Besides the horrific videos of the RSF as they celebrate civilian murder, Maxar satellite imagery obtained by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University shows red discoloration between and around homes in and around Al-Fashir and they believe that this red is likely to be blood is due to mass killings of civilians.
As the killings are happening in Al-Fashir, RSF soldiers have also launched a vengeful attack on the people of Bara, a farming town in Northern Kordofan state after the RSF re-captured the town from SAF. Activists from there have reported that at least 300 civilians were killed, with entire families wiped from the civil registry after they were accused of being collaborators with SAF. Many of us don’t know the fate of friends and family members still trapped under RSF fire in Bara.
This impunity will continue as long as the international community acknowledges that the RSF is now operating until Tasees, a coalition of political bodies whose politicians continue to circle the world and wine and dine at five-star hotels. Just last week, the brother of the leader of the RSF and Tasees, Al-Gony Hamdan Daglo, was enjoying his stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York even though the US Treasury Department has sanctioned him under Executive Order (EO) 14098.
The people in Al-Fashir and Bara need immediate protection, this racially-motivated killing machine needs to stop and women’s protection has to be prioritized. Girls and women are at risk of unprecedented levels of sexual violence and a life-time of trauma. The people of Al-Fashir stayed there because they believed in their power to protect their city and live in it during its most difficult days, but also because they believed that the international community could protect them. In June 2024, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution that calls on the RSF to halt its siege of Al-Fashir, but even after adopting UNSC Resolution 2736 on El Fasher and UNSC 2417 on the use of starvation as a weapon of war, nothing has changed for the people on the ground.
They were besieged, starved and shelled with drones with the RSF soldiers killing, raping and humiliating the civilians who tried to leave the city. Right now, tens of thousands of civilians are trapped inside Al-Fashir, while on one day, over 7,400 civilians fled the city to a nearby town called Tawila, most of them on foot.
The UAE continues to fund and support the genocide of Al-Fashir through arming the RSF through numerous documented trips carrying arms and Foreign Mercenaries from as far as Colombia to logistical hubs it has created in neighboring countries. There will be no peace if the arms stop flowing into the hands of Abululu and career génocidaires, the UAE and other supporters need to be held accountable. The people of Al-Fashir need political will, they need action and they need it now.
The Nalafem Sudan Taskforce is a Pan-African, Sudanese feminist-led coalition mobilizing political, diplomatic, and international pressure for an inclusive, gender-responsive peace process in Sudan.