On October 27, a video surfaced on social media showing at least nine men sitting slumped in a row at the side of a dirt road in the town of El Fasher, in Sudan’s Darfur region. Their slender wrists hang on their knees. They are exhausted and defeated, held prisoner by long-haired militiamen in camouflage pants, one of whom brandishes a whip above his head. Another, Alfateh Abdullah Idris, nicknamed Abu Lulu, casually begins firing a Kalashnikov rifle into the row of prisoners. The last man, in a last-second protective reflex, lowers his head and crosses his hands over it, but the bullets make him step back, and the other militiamen join in, shooting repeatedly at the corpses. Abu Lulu posted the video.
Abu Lulu holds the rank of brigadier general in the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that broke away and, since April 2023, has been fighting against the Sudanese armed forces for control of Sudan, a gold-rich country in northeast Africa. The day the videos were published, Abu Lulu and the other fighters were celebrating their capture of the town. The siege had lasted five hundred days, more than three times the duration of the siege of Stalingrad. The RSF used drones and artillery supplied by the United Arab Emirates. In early May, the militia began building a 40-kilometer-long wall around the city to prevent the entry of food and humanitarian aid; Since then, people have survived on grass and animal food. There were a million people living in El Fasher when the RSF arrived. It still housed two hundred and sixty thousand people at the end of October, when the last members of the government forces began to flee the city, leaving it open to the RSF. The group distanced itself from Abu Lulu after the city fell, and said he had stopped it. Al Jazeera indicated that he had since been released; he continued to post on social media.
“The world has not yet understood how big a problem El Fasher is,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Raymond’s team tracked atrocities in Sudan using satellite images from NASA and commercial sources. The team’s analysis indicates that, since the fall of El Fasher, the RSF have engaged in massacres. “In some cases, if someone is shot while running and you take a photo of them with a satellite, it looks like a ‘C’ or a ‘J’ because they fall and hit the ground on their knees or on their side in the fetal position,” Raymond told me. 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 about tens and tens of thousands of potential deaths in five days.” And the berm built to prevent El Fasher aid from accessing El Fasher now makes it difficult to leave the city; We know that only thirty-five thousand people did it. Raymond’s team now calls El Fasher the Killbox.
Many of El Fasher’s residents were members of non-Arab Sudanese ethnic minorities, whom the RSF, whose core consists of nomadic Arabs, targeted throughout the war. The Four and the Zaghawa, who are black Sudanese, were the first in the RSF’s crosshairs, although the militia also attacked members of other non-Arab groups, such as the Berti. Speaking by telephone from Cairo, Altahir Hashim, a Sudanese human rights activist who helped organize a soup kitchen in El Fasher and distribute aid throughout Darfur, told me: “They are carrying out ethnic cleansing. They are killing, they are destroying.”
Throughout the beginning of the last week of October, RSF fighters broadcast videos of the killings. In one, they shout “God is great” over corpses, holding victory signs and brandishing guns. In another, they force men to dig their own graves. The RSF continues, in many ways, a tradition of mass atrocities. In the early 2000s, its predecessor organization, a militia known as Janjaweed, carried out a genocide in Darfur that killed some three hundred thousand people. Hashim and his family, members of the Zaghawa, were forced to flee to El Fasher. Two of his brothers were killed. “After almost twenty-three years, the genocide has never ended,” he told me. “The world stood by and watched, without taking any concrete action. »
