El Fasher’s Last Stand: ’The City Has Fallen’

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have killed “most of the civilians who had remained inside” North Darfur’s capital El Fasher, the Coordination of Resistance Committees in the city said in a statement on Oct. 28.

According to the United Nations, about 260,000 civilians, including 130,000 children, were trapped in the city, besieged by the RSF for over 500 days since last May. Cut off from their food supply, its residents had survived on animal fodder.

Even animal fodder has been inaccessible for most since last week, after the RSF completed construction of a 57-kilometer wall around the city to stop the meager flow of supplies that were being smuggled in through the siege.

With no international action to break the siege or airdrop of supplies, death by starvation was a sealed fate — but death came sooner, by metal and fire.

Raining shells on the starving, thousands of RSF troops in armored vehicles and tanks launched an attack on the city from all directions on Oct. 25. Sick, wounded and hungry, the local fighters of the Popular Resistance held ground alongside the soldiers of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), defending its last remaining foothold in Darfur.

The rest of this western region of Sudan, with five of its 18 states, had already been taken over by the RSF, with El Fasher being the SAF’s last holdout. The RSF had already attacked the city over 260 times in this war, but was repelled by determined resistance each time.

On Sunday, however, the RSF managed a breakthrough from the east as the fighters defending the city on that front, with no air support from the SAF, fell under heavy fire. Condemning Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the SAF chief and head of the government based in Port Sudan, for abandoning his soldiers, the resistance committees shared a video of the aftermath.

Scores of SAF soldiers and Popular Resistance fighters lay dead in trenches amid the burning wreckage of their pickup trucks that blackened the air with thick smoke. Distant gunfire continued in the background.

Taking over the 6th Infantry Division headquarters, the SAF’s last military base in Darfur, the RSF claimed control of El Fasher on Oct. 26. Contesting premature media reports of El Fasher’s fall at the time, the Popular Resistance insisted that the RSF’s capture of the military base did not mean El Fasher had fallen.

Vowing to resist till the end, its fighters retreated to better fortified positions and continued to engage the RSF in several parts of the city. “We affirm that El Fasher … will remain defiant,” its statement insisted.

“Battles continue, and the fighters remain steadfast,” the resistance committeec reported. Despite Burhan’s “betrayal”, it added, “the sons of this city will hold out to their last breath .… Then history will remember who resisted … and who left their soldiers and commanders to fight alone.”

They fought on for three days until the evening of Oct. 28, when the resistance committee reported that “the last resisting soldier fired his last bullet” and “then fell as a martyr.” The guns have gone silent. “The city has fallen, but its dignity has not.”

Massacres, summary executions, burning of homes

The RSF then rounded up the wounded resistance fighters and civilians in the Saudi hospital, one of the last partially functioning in the city, in a building shelled multiple times. Its troops then “collectively executed” them all, the resistance committees reported later in the evening. They also reportedly abducted medics, demanding $250,000 from their families for their release.

The RSF’s atrocities in El Fasher “constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, and some of them even amount to genocide,” the Darfur Bar Association said in a statement.

The RSF is committing “heinous massacres against unarmed civilians” and “burning of homes”, added the Sudanese Doctors’ Syndicate in a statement calling for the setting up of “field emergency centers” in nearby villages receiving those who have managed to escape El Fasher.

According to the International Organization for Migration, at least 26,000 people fled the city in the two days since Oct. 26. It is unclear how many survived. The RSF troops have posted many videos of themselves chasing down the fleeing civilians in armored vehicles with machine guns, whiplashing them into a line and summarily executing them with gunshots.

The best chance for survival for those who managed to escape is to walk over 60 kilometers to Tawila, past the bodies of many who had fled earlier but succumbed en route to hunger, thirst, wounds or fresh attacks by bandits on the lawless stretch.

Those who survive the journey and reach Tawila lack the “basic lifesaving services, including water and food”, said Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees. The overcrowded camps for the displaced, already hosting 650,000 people, were a hot spot of cholera recently.

Nevertheless, those reaching these camps are the lucky ones. “New arrivals have recounted stories of widespread ethnically and politically motivated killings” in El Fasher, “including reports of people with disabilities being executed because they were unable to flee,” the U.N. reported. Others were “shot as they tried to escape.”

A long chain of international complicity

In the meantime, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres “as usual, merely repeated expressions of concern and condemnation … in words only … without taking effective measures to protect civilians on the ground,” said the Darfur Bar Association. “Had those measures been taken on time, the killing of innocents and the bloodshed that occurred — and continues to occur — in El Fasher could have been avoided.”

The resistance committees insist that “El Fasher was not defeated — it was betrayed.” SAF chief Burhan and the U.N. were not the only betrayers. “There are a lot more people responsible for what’s going on in El Fasher,” said Ahmed Kaballo, a Sudanese national and founder of the persecuted pan-African media platform African Stream.

Kenya’s President Willian Ruto allowed the RSF to form a parallel government in Nairobi. “The European Union funded … the RSF, knowing that they were a bloodthirsty mercenary group,” Kaballo said. “They gave them support, not despite this, but because of this,” thinking “who better to police the Mediterranean” and “stop the refugees from coming to Europe”.

Britain “pressured African governments not to condemn the UAE [United Arab Emirates] for their role in supporting the RSF,” he added. After all, the RSF is using British-made military equipment, likely supplied to it by the UAE.

Chad, Ethiopia and Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya are helping the UAE smuggle weapons into RSF-controlled territories and smuggle out the gold mined from mineral-rich Darfur to Dubai, Kaballo said. The UAE “is the main beneficiary of the chaos and the destruction we are seeing in El Fasher.”

The UAE hosts much of the financial network behind the RSF’s war machine, consisting of numerous owned or associated companies.

The U.S. has formally sanctioned the RSF’s leader, weapons supplier and related companies. However, the gentle form of sanctions has not shut down the group’s corporate network in the Emirates.

The Trump administration hosted an RSF delegation in Washington on Oct. 24 for indirect negotiations with the SAF delegation led by Sudan’s foreign minister. Also present were representatives from Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

With the UAE refusing to discuss El Fasher, negotiations collapsed hours before the RSF started the attack, the Middle East Eye reported. While the SAF delegate demanded that the U.S. rein in the UAE’s support for the RSF, Trump’s envoy for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, demanded that the SAF stop purchasing arms from Iran.

He also reportedly insisted that the SAF should reiterate its normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel. The SAF had already signed the Abraham Accords in 2021, but as part of a military junta in which it had shared power with the RSF, alongside token ministries for a technocratic civilian component, which was jointly removed by the SAF and the RSF in a coup only months later.

How SAF helped create the RSF?

The collaboration between the SAF and the RSF is over a decade old. The RSF was formed in 2013 by coalescing the Janjaweed militias spawned by the SAF to commit mass atrocities during the Darfur civil war in the 2000s.

The militias were recruited from the tribes of nomadic, Arabic-speaking cattle herders, who, amid depleting fertile land and water due to desertification, were already in conflict with the local settled farmers, who spoke African languages. When these local, darker-skinned populations rebelled against marginalization, the regime, then ruled by the dictator Omar al-Bashir, ethnicized the war as a conflict between Arabs and Africans.

Burhan was the SAF’s commander in Darfur at the time. RSF was later formed by placing the Janjaweed militias under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, whom Bashir baptized as “Hemeti” – meaning “my protector” – setting up his force as a guardian against any potential military coups.

However, under the pressure of mass pro-democracy protests that erupted in December 2018, Burhan and Hemeti teamed up to remove Bashir in a coup in April 2019.

Unwilling to settle for a military junta formed by the SAF and the RSF as the replacement for Bashir’s government, mass protests, led by the network of resistance committees organized in localities across Sudan, continued until the war started in April 2023.

Since then, the committees have been at the forefront of organizing relief and rescue for civilians in Sudan, over 14 million of whom have been forced to flee in the world’s largest displacement crisis.

“We will stay here resisting until our last breath,” several activists of El Fasher’s resistance committee declared when the attack started. Three days later, on the morning of Oct. 28, the committee reported, “most of the civilians who remained inside the city have been killed.”