Three weeks prior, a Sudanese woman identified only as Hala for security reasons left the displacement camp in Tawila to travel 60 kilometers east back to her hometown of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur seized by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a full year earlier. She boarded a small vehicle operated by the paramilitary group, which has spent the past year terrorizing local civilians through widespread killings, sexual violence, and mass looting. Upon her arrival, Hala found the city unrecognizable: homes ransacked or reduced to rubble, once-familiar streets distorted by destruction. RSF fighters immediately intercepted her the moment she stepped off the transport, interrogating her about her destination, planned length of stay, and exact home address to verify she was not lying. After describing her property and explaining she needed more than 24 hours to sort through wreckage to retrieve critical documents including her birth certificate and national ID from the powerless, dark home, she was granted a handwritten entry permit signed by the group. Hala described the pervasive, arbitrary danger facing all residents and returnees: RSF fighters can break into homes unannounced, threaten sexual assault to coerce compliance, beat detainees, or imprison anyone who dares to argue. She noted that travel to el-Fasher is uniquely life-threatening for women, with most people making the dangerous trip being elderly residents or fathers, as young men face near-certain targeted harm. On her second day in the city, Hala was accosted on a public street by RSF fighters who shouted abusive, insulting language at her; only the presence of other nearby civilians prevented a physical attack. She recalled the cruel, dissonant rhetoric the fighters used even amid threats: “The strangest thing is that they might assault you and then tell you that el-Fasher belongs to you, that this is your home, and that you are welcome to return.” Hala fled back to Tawila shortly after, vowing she will never step foot in el-Fasher again, no matter how much conditions improve. The full-scale RSF offensive to seize el-Fasher launched on 26 October 2025, after more than 500 days of brutal siege, marking the deadliest single massacre of Sudan’s ongoing war that first erupted in April 2023 between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), a conflict that has spawned the world’s largest current humanitarian crisis. Researchers at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab emphasized the speed and industrial scale of the killings were comparable in scope to the Rwandan genocide. Backed by the United Arab Emirates, which continues to deny any involvement in the conflict, RSF fighters filmed themselves perpetrating mass civilian executions. Survivors have documented widespread atrocities including targeted rape of girls and young women, forced blood extraction from survivors held in makeshift clinics, and systematic extortion of civilian households. Mohamed Hassan, an el-Fasher resident who escaped to safety, recounted to Middle East Eye how RSF fighters rounded up dozens of families on local streets, separated men from women and children, verbally abused and lashed the women, and opened fire randomly on the men, executing immediately anyone they suspected of being affiliated with the SAF or allied joint forces. Hanin, a Sudanese mother who fled el-Fasher with only her young daughter in her arms, took shelter in Tawila but has never felt the sense of safety she expected to find there. “I survived horrible things. There are things that happened to me that I struggle to speak about. I am a mother, and I tried to protect my daughter. I cannot explain what it does to you to see your child suffer violence and know that you could not stop it. We survived, but survival does not mean we are no longer hurting,” she shared. An aid worker identified as Anna confirmed that the RSF now operates a network of informal detention facilities across el-Fasher, repurposing old buildings to hold detainees who are denied food and life-saving medical care when they fall ill. Roughly 107,000 people fled el-Fasher in the six weeks before the final RSF offensive, leaving an estimated 260,000 civilians trapped inside the city when the assault began. Humanitarian groups including Doctors Without Borders have raised the unanswerable question of what happened to the thousands of additional residents unaccounted for. The full final death toll may never be confirmed: monitoring groups using satellite imagery recorded at least 6,000 fatalities in the first 72 hours of the offensive alone, but the RSF has imposed a total communications blackout on the city and barred all human rights investigators from entering. One year later, bodies continue to be uncovered, and the casualty count keeps rising. This week, 200 mass graves were discovered in the North Kordofan town of Bara, where volunteer recovery teams have pulled more than 600 civilian corpses from sites witnesses confirm were the location of RSF killings during the same October 2025 offensive that captured el-Fasher. A series of formal global findings over the past year have formally classified the RSF’s actions as genocide: in February, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded the RSF carried out acts of genocide in el-Fasher, noting genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the group’s documented conduct. The U.S. government, alongside leading human rights organizations including the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and Amnesty International, have also formally designated RSF atrocities in Darfur as genocide. In July, Amnesty International described the massacres in el-Fasher as “a stain on the conscience of humanity.” The final offensive marked the culmination of a months-long genocidal campaign: the RSF laid full siege to el-Fasher from May 2024 to October 2025, constructing large earthen berms around the entire city to trap civilians inside, shelling residential areas on a near-daily basis, and completely cutting off access to incoming food and medical supplies. The World Food Programme reported that trapped residents were eventually forced to survive on animal fodder and discarded food waste after all trade routes into the city were blocked. A senior doctor who spent nearly two years working inside an el-Fasher hospital described the agonizing conditions of the siege to MEE: the facility became the entire world for its staff, who slept on site, scavenged for whatever food they could find, and spent nearly all their waking hours caring for patients. As the siege tightened, medical supplies ran completely dry, essential medicines were exhausted, and medical equipment broke down with no way to repair it. Reliable electricity and clean water access disappeared entirely, with generators only permitted to run for two hours each night. Life-saving emergency surgeries were performed using only the light from mobile phone flashlights, with no access to surgical gauze or available antibiotics. “One of the most painful experiences for a doctor is watching a patient deteriorate when you know exactly what treatment they need but have no way of providing it. That happened far too often in el-Fasher,” the doctor said, noting that staff suffered the same malnutrition and lack of care as their patients, with some colleagues falling severely ill or malnourished but continuing to work to treat waiting civilians. Any resident who attempted to break the RSF blockade to bring in food supplies faced immediate deadly punishment: Human Rights Watch documented multiple lethal attacks on young people and traders running supply routes, with reports of public executions of people caught carrying food. One widely circulated video showed a young woman named Qisma Ali Omar hung by her arms from a tree with her feet bound, filmed by RSF fighters for public distribution. When the city fell on 26 October 2025, RSF fighters first targeted sites where displaced families and civilians had gathered to seek shelter: nearly 500 people were massacred at the Saudi Maternity Hospital, where patients, medical staff, and displaced families made up almost entirely of women and children had taken refuge. UN investigators later documented coordinated mass killings at el-Fasher University, the Saudi Hospital, on all escape routes out of the city, and at the earthen berms originally built to trap residents. Amnesty International verified multiple videos showing an RSF commander executing civilian captives, while other footage captured dozens of civilian bodies piled in a trench running alongside the city’s perimeter berm. In the aftermath of the killings, the RSF launched a systematic cover-up campaign: Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains between 26 October and 28 November 2025, 20 of which showed clear signs of burning, and 57 of which were completely erased and disappeared within four weeks. Satellite imagery captured repeated burning of a pit full of apparent human remains at the Saudi Maternity Hospital through November, while large piles of suspected bodies beside the berm were cleared away entirely. RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti, later announced a formal investigation into what he called “violations” committed by his troops during the capture of el-Fasher. One year later, el-Fasher stands as a city of ruins and trapped remaining civilians. When a tightly supervised UN team was finally granted access to the city in December 2025, they described the entire urban area as an active crime scene, and found very few remaining residents, one in six of whom screened positive for severe acute malnutrition. Even civilians who successfully escaped el-Fasher have not been safe from RSF persecution: survivors report the paramilitary group still detains fleeing men and demands ransoms as high as $3,000 for their release, with one monitoring group documenting nearly 68,000 arbitrary civilian detentions. The once small town of Tawila now hosts roughly 800,000 displaced people, the vast majority of whom fled from el-Fasher. Khadijah, an elderly woman originally from el-Geneina in West Darfur, traced her long journey of displacement across Darfur after the RSF seized her hometown in the summer of 2023, leaving bodies uncollected in the streets. “I fled to el-Fasher seeking safety. But conflict followed, forcing me to displacement again. Now, I live under a tree on a farm, exposed to the elements. There is little food here, and I have no shelter. The cold is unbearable. I’m struggling to survive,” she shared. Mudathir Mohammed Diqourni, a member of an el-Fasher civilian resistance committee, warned that RSF militias are now systematically destroying farmland across South and Central Darfur, deliberately targeting and shooting farmers as they travel to their fields or attempt to protect their crops and agricultural property. Widespread hunger is now pushing rural villagers to flee toward Tawila in search of life-saving relief, a pattern Diqourni describes as deliberate demographic engineering, designed to drive the last remaining rural Darfur residents into displacement camps or across international borders through a policy of systematic starvation and impoverishment. The haunting image of farmers racing against RSF-affiliated Janjaweed fighters on camelback through fields to salvage scraps of fodder for their own livestock has become a defining symbol of the crisis. From their stronghold in el-Fasher, the RSF has expanded its campaign of violence east into Kordofan and south toward the Ethiopian border. The UN’s fact-finding mission has found reasonable grounds to confirm that private companies and recruiters operating out of the UAE have routed weapons, drone components, logistical support, and mercenary personnel to the RSF through supply routes running through Chad, southeastern Libya, and Bosaso in Somalia. Middle East Eye has previously published extensive investigative reports documenting this supply network, as well as the use of Ethiopian military bases to provide direct support to RSF operations. The United States remains the UAE’s largest single source of military hardware: the Trump administration pushed through $1.4 billion in sales of Chinook helicopters and F-16 spare parts to Abu Dhabi in May 2025 despite an active congressional hold, and approved more than $8 billion in new sales of weapons, drones, and missiles earlier this year, with billions more in additional arms transfers that bypassed mandatory congressional review entirely. British-manufactured weaponry has also been recovered from Sudanese battlefields, with the UK government facing widespread accusations that it failed to intervene to stop the el-Fasher massacre out of fear of damaging diplomatic and economic ties with the UAE. Today, volunteer recovery teams in Bara are still digging through mass graves to recover civilian remains, Khadijah still sleeps exposed under a tree on a Tawila-area farm, and Hanin sees fellow displaced people in the camp grow weaker by the day, with some dying from starvation overnight. “El-Fasher has completely changed. We have now reached a point where, if you want to visit your own home, you need permission from the RSF. That alone shows the situation we have reached. We just hope the war ends and things get better,” Hala said in a final plea for global action.