Frontier Correspondent
El Fasher, Sudan.
In the dim glow of a solar lamp, inside a cramped tent in the sprawling Tawila displacement camp, Fatima clutches a faded photograph of her husband and three children. The image, creased from months of flight, captures a fleeting moment of peace before April 2023, when Sudan’s fragile truce collapsed into full-blown civil war.
Now 42, Fatima, not her real name, for fear of reprisal, recounts the horror that drove her from El Geneina, the West Darfur city where the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) unleashed what the United States has formally deemed genocide.
“The RSF and their Arab militia allies came at dawn. They shouted slurs, called us zurga, black slaves unworthy of the land. My husband tried to shield us, but they dragged him out and shot him in the street. Then they turned to the girls,” she says, her voice steady but her eyes distant.
Fatima’s story is one of more than 220 survivor testimonies collected by Human Rights Watch between June 2023 and April 2024 — accounts that together paint a portrait of systematic slaughter in El Geneina from April to November 2023. Thousands were killed, homes torched, women and girls subjected to mass rape as a weapon of ethnic terror.
UN experts estimate between 10,000 and 15,000 deaths in that campaign alone — a grim echo of the early-2000s Darfur genocide, when the RSF’s predecessors, the Janjaweed militias, razed non-Arab villages with impunity.
A Nation Unraveling
Fatima’s escape is one thread in a vast tapestry of displacement. More than 12 million Sudanese — over a quarter of the population — have been uprooted since the war erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF. Once uneasy allies in a junta that toppled Sudan’s civilian government in 2021, SAF chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti — now wage a proxy-fueled war consuming the country.
Sudan has filed a case at the International Court of Justice against the United Arab Emirates, alleging that Abu Dhabi’s weapons and funding enabled RSF atrocities across Darfur. Both sides, meanwhile, have been accused of receiving foreign arms in defiance of international sanctions.
The Return of Genocide
In Darfur, the conflict has taken on an ethnic ferocity reminiscent of two decades ago — targeting non-Arab groups such as the Massalit, Fur, and Zaghawa.
On January 7, 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that RSF forces and allied militias had committed genocide, citing “systematic killings of men and boys — even infants — on ethnic grounds, alongside widespread rape and forced displacement.”
The RSF, now under sweeping U.S. sanctions, controls most of Darfur, including lucrative gold mines that bankroll its campaign. Hemedti, whose forces trace their lineage to the Janjaweed, denies targeting civilians, blaming “local militias” and SAF provocations.
But the evidence is overwhelming.
At Zamzam camp, once a refuge for half a million, famine has replaced sanctuary. Sarah, another survivor, described the RSF’s February 2025 assault:
“They came shooting. Families were executed in their shelters. We ate grass and dirt to survive.”
Amnesty International corroborated her account, documenting ethnically targeted killings and starvation used as a weapon of war. The UN declared famine in Darfur in August 2024 — with 25 million Sudanese now facing acute hunger, the world’s largest hunger crisis.
El Fasher: The Fall and the Evidence
No place bears the RSF’s shadow more darkly than El Fasher, the final SAF bastion in Darfur until its fall on October 27, 2025, after an 18-month siege.
Within hours, graphic videos flooded X and Telegram — many filmed by the perpetrators themselves. The clips show RSF fighters in identifiable uniforms interrogating, humiliating, and executing unarmed men. Some plead for mercy; others lie motionless, already dying.
One verified video shows civilians lined up on the Tawila road, hands raised, begging: “We are civilians, please don’t kill us.” An RSF fighter opens fire, pumping extra rounds into the bodies as comrades cheer. Another video shows a commander known as “Abu Lu’lu’a” taunting a wounded Massalit man before shooting him seven times point-blank.
These videos — posted on RSF-linked Telegram channels and X accounts — serve as both trophies and terror tactics. Fighters boast of rape and looting as “our right.”
Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab confirms what the footage foretells: clusters of human remains near RSF vehicles, dozens of new graves, and earthworks sealing off neighborhoods in “house-to-house clearance” operations.
The UN Human Rights Office reports summary executions inside mosques and hospitals, echoing El Geneina’s massacres. Medics and Sudanese officials estimate at least 2,000 dead, though the true toll may reach several thousand — a pace of killing approaching Rwanda’s darkest days.
A young survivor, now in Tawila with gunshot wounds to his legs, recalls:
“They rounded up men at checkpoints, separated us like cattle. I saw brothers shot for refusing to chant RSF praises. Women were dragged into alleys.”
His testimony mirrors UN-verified videos and dozens of field reports documenting identical RSF tactics across Darfur — a decentralized network of tribal militias and warlords spreading terror for profit and power.
A War Without Witnesses
The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission, in its September 2025 report “A War of Atrocities,” accuses the RSF of crimes against humanity in El Fasher — including murder, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, and deliberate starvation. Both factions have destroyed hospitals, looted markets, and blocked humanitarian aid.
At least 84 aid workers have been killed since 2023. The International Criminal Court, still investigating Darfur after two decades, is now gathering fresh evidence against RSF commanders.
Digital Witness, Silent World
In Tawila’s dust-choked markets, families barter scraps to survive. Amid the despair, defiance endures — not only in whispers, but on screens. Survivors scroll X on smuggled phones, sharing warnings: “Don’t run alone. They film it all.”
Local militias like the Sudan Liberation Army vow protection, but fatigue runs deep.
“We have buried our future,” one elder murmurs, gesturing to shallow graves.
Fatima, folding her photo away, adds softly:
“These screens show our death — but they also tell our truth. The world saw the first Darfur genocide. Now they watch again, in real time. When will they act?”
The UN and rights groups continue to press for an arms embargo, humanitarian corridors, and accountability, as whispers of a Hague arrest warrant for Hemedti grow louder. Yet as RSF flags rise over Darfur’s cities and global powers look elsewhere, Sudan bleeds — unseen, except by those holding the cameras.
In the tents of Tawila, hope endures not in headlines, but in resilience — in the quiet conviction that someday, dawn will bring light, not horsemen; and no phone will ever again record a final plea.