On October 27th, a video went out over social media that showed at least nine men sitting slumped in a row beside a dirt track in the city of El Fasher, in Sudan’s Darfur region. Their thin wrists dangle over their knees. They are exhausted and defeated, held prisoner by long-haired militiamen in camouflage slacks, one of whom brandishes a whip over his head. Another, Alfateh Abdullah Idris, who goes by the nickname Abu Lulu, casually begins firing a Kalashnikov rifle down the row of prisoners. The final man, in a last-second protective reflex, bows his head and crosses his hands over it, but bullets send him flying backward, and the other militiamen join in, firing repeatedly at the dead bodies. Abu Lulu posted the video.
Abu Lulu holds the rank of brigadier general in the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that broke away from and, since April of 2023, has fought against the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of Sudan, a gold-rich country in northeast Africa. The day the videos were posted, Abu Lulu and the other fighters were celebrating their capture of the city. The siege had lasted five hundred days, more than three times as long as the siege of Stalingrad. The R.S.F. used drones and artillery provided by the United Arab Emirates. In early May, the militia began building a thirty-five-mile-long berm around the city, to prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering; people have survived on grass and animal feed since. There were a million people living in El Fasher when the R.S.F. arrived. It was still home to two hundred and sixty thousand people in late October, when the last members of the government forces began to flee the city, leaving it open to the R.S.F. The group distanced itself from Abu Lulu after the fall of the city, and said that it had arrested him. Al Jazeera reported that he has since been released; he has continued to post on social media.
“The world hasn’t caught up to what a big deal El Fasher is,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Raymond’s team has been tracking atrocities in Sudan using satellite imagery from NASA and commercial sources. The team’s analysis indicates that, since El Fasher fell, the R.S.F. has been conducting mass killings. “In some cases, if someone is shot when they’re running, and you take a picture of it with a satellite, it looks like a ‘C’ or a ‘J,’ because they drop and hit the ground on their knees or on their side in the fetal position,” Raymond told me. The satellite images show a proliferation of “C”s and “J”s, with bloodstains visible from space. “It’s simple math here,” he said. “We are talking tens upon tens of thousands of potential dead in five days.” And the berm built to keep aid out of El Fasher has now made it difficult to escape the city; only thirty-five thousand people are known to have done so. Raymond’s team now refers to El Fasher as the Killbox.
Many of El Fasher’s residents were members of non-Arab Sudanese ethnic minorities, which the R.S.F., whose core is made up of nomadic Arabs, has targeted throughout the war. The Fur and the Zaghawa, who are Black Sudanese, have been first in the R.S.F.’s firing line, though the militia has attacked members of other non-Arab groups, such as the Berti, as well. Speaking on the phone from Cairo, Altahir Hashim, a Sudanese human-rights activist who helped organize a soup kitchen in El Fasher and aid distribution throughout Darfur, told me, “They’re ethnically cleansing. They’re killing, they’re destroying.”
All through the beginning of the last week of October, R.S.F. fighters posted videos of the killings. In one, they shout “God is great” over corpses, flashing victory signs and lofting rifles. In another, they force men to dig their own graves. The R.S.F. is, in many ways, continuing a tradition of mass atrocities. In the early two-thousands, its predecessor organization, a militia known as the Janjaweed, perpetrated a genocide in Darfur that killed some three hundred thousand people. Hashim and his family, who are members of the Zaghawa, were forced to flee to El Fasher. Two of his brothers were killed. “After almost twenty-three years, genocide never ended,” he told me. “The world has just stood there watching, not taking any concrete action.”
