Darfur’s Endless War

[John Ashworth]

Darfur’s Endless War

As paramilitaries tear through their already devastated province,
self-defense fighters in North Darfur have taken up arms to defend
their homes.

February 12, 2026 issue
The New York Review
Jérôme Tubiana

When El-Fasher fell, on October 26 and 27, I was driving between
villages scattered across the region of Dar Zaghawa, about a day from
the city by car. This semidesert land at the northwest corner of
Darfur, marked by rocky hills and sparse acacia trees, is the home of
the Zaghawa people, a non-Arab community of herders and farmers. Since
the war began in Darfur over two decades ago, Zaghawa fighters have
been crucial to the region’s insurgency, and now to its defense; it
was mainly Zaghawa rebels and self-defense forces who kept the Rapid
Support Forces (RSF)—the mostly Arab paramilitary group that has spent
the past two and a half years fighting its former mentors in the
regular Sudanese army—from invading El-Fasher over eighteen months of
siege.

The fall of the city, Darfur’s historical capital, was a shock across
Dar Zaghawa. Everyone here has relatives in El-Fasher, civilians or
fighters. Every living soul in every village seemed to be gathering in
the small shacks of branch and straw where local merchants sell
Internet access through Elon Musk’s Starlink. That network has also
been accused of guiding killer drones, but now it was the only way to
get news.

People were trying to call their relatives and friends in the city on
WhatsApp, but none answered. Sometimes an RSF soldier would pick up, a
sign that the phone’s owner may have been killed. There was nothing to
do but watch the videos the RSF fighters were posting and try to
recognize a face among the bodies lying on the ground, or among the
crowds of prisoners shepherded by gunmen brandishing whips and calling
them falangay, the most popular of several derogatory terms that the
RSF’s supporters apply to the non-Arabs mobilized against them. (Many
of these terms mean some version of “slave.”)

Before El-Fasher’s fall, it had still been possible to call or message
friends in the besieged city and get some news. Since arriving in Dar
Zaghawa in early October I had tried to speak daily with my old
friends Bakri, an English teacher, and Khalil Daosa, one of the
self-defense leaders.

For a year and a half the defenders had repelled the RSF’s ground
attacks. But after the paramilitaries failed to keep control of
Sudan’s capital, which the Sudanese army retook in April, they
resolved to capture all Darfur instead and intensified their bombing
campaign, using artillery and, increasingly, drones.

El-Fasher and Dar Zaghawa—both under the control of the rebel groups
and self-defense forces allied with the army—were among the main
pockets of resistance. Because that resistance was spearheaded by
Zaghawa fighters, the RSF targeted members of the tribe, who also made
up a large share of El-Fasher’s hundreds of thousands of remaining
civilian inhabitants. On October 2, Khalil reported, the
paramilitaries had hit a shelter and a communal kitchen, killing
humanitarian workers and other civilians. “There’s bombing on main
roads and gathering places for the displaced,” Bakri wrote me that
day. “This morning, a shelter and a nearby mosque were targeted,”
Khalil texted on October 11. “May God be merciful.” Soon reports
emerged that the strike had killed fifty-seven people, including
children and the elderly.

Both Khalil and Bakri barely spoke about the hunger, but I knew the
food situation in the city was desperate. In a rare message on the
subject, on October 6, Bakri told me that most people had been eating
ambaz, residue from peanut oil mills usually used to feed livestock.
The price of this cheap byproduct had risen, he said, to seven dollars
a kilogram: “We became equal to our animals.”

Neither of them lingered on the days spent sheltering in foxholes. “I
am now messaging you and bombing is falling on us,” Khalil wrote on
October 3. “Our morale is very high, and we have flags of glory,” he
messaged a day later. “But yes, it is violent. May God protect the
country from it.” Every morning the defenders’ social media feeds
buzzed with praise for the resistance and glorified El-Fasher with new
nicknames: El-Fasher al-Sumud (“El-Fasher the Resistant”), “Entry with
No Return,” “Cemetery of Janjaweed,” “Poison of Janjaweed.” (The RSF
partly originates from the Janjaweed militias of the early 2000s,
which Sudan’s then ruler, Omar al-Bashir, had used to suppress
non-Arab rebels in the region.) The most popular was “the Lion’s
Whiskers”—better not touch them.

Before El-Fasher fell, hardly a day would pass in Um Baru, one of the
older chieftaincies in Dar Zaghawa, without news that someone from the
village had been killed in the besieged city. Again and again the
villagers gathered for commemorative ceremonies; on October 12 they
mourned a well-known engineer, one of at least eight civilian victims
after the RSF bombed a mosque where congregants were preparing for
prayer. Five days later they gathered on behalf of another son of the
village, killed fighting the RSF in the desert.

That morning a pair of older fighters showed up to pray. Two of the
founders of the Darfur rebellion in the early 2000s, they were now
leaders in the self-defense forces. Salah “Bob” (no longer sporting
the dreadlocks that once gave him his nickname) always wears a uniform
and carries an AK rifle. Mohamed Nyere (“Rags”) does so only when the
situation looks worrying, and that day he had come prepared: two days
ago the RSF had seized the village of Abu Gamra, sixty miles away. As
I caught up with them, hundreds of self-defense fighters were rushing
south in pickup trucks, on motorbikes, on horses, and on camels to
push the RSF back. (They ultimately succeeded.)

Abu Gamra is no less symbolically important than El-Fasher: both Salah
and Nyere recall it as the place where the Darfur rebellion began. In
the 1980s, during the country’s second civil war, when Salah was
eighteen and Nyere in his twenties, they briefly joined the Sudanese
army before defecting, unwilling to fight non-Arab rebels in what was
then southern Sudan. Instead they joined an earlier Darfuri opposition
group that spent the following years discussing whether to take up
arms or opt for unarmed political mobilization. Then, in 2001, Arab
militias killed several dozen Zaghawa near Abu Gamra. Zaghawa youths
started forming self-defense groups, then called “popular camps,” and
one day a group of just twenty-five fighters launched a successful
attack on Abu Gamra’s police station. It was the founding act of the
Darfur rebellion. A year later, once they had amassed a few more
recruits, the rebels declared themselves the Darfur Liberation Front.

In April 2003, having renamed themselves the Sudan Liberation Army,
they launched a surprise attack on El-Fasher airport with thirteen
cars and around three hundred men, destroying two planes and five
helicopters. Humiliated, al-Bashir decided to unleash the Janjaweed,
who proceeded not simply to chase the rebels but to target their
non-Arab communities in a first wave of ethnic violence. The war has
not stopped since.

For a decade Dar Zaghawa was one of Sudan’s main rebel-controlled
territories. But in 2013, as rebellion spread nationwide, al-Bashir
made another consequential decision: he formed a better-equipped, more
official version of the Janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces.
Within a few years the RSF had expelled the rebels from Dar Zaghawa;
most of them left the country to serve as mercenaries in Libya. But
Darfur’s self-defense troops—at first absorbed into the rebel army but
long skeptical of its agenda—had taken up guns to protect their
homeland, not to fight abroad. “All rebels had gone to Libya and we
needed forces to defend our community,” Nyere told me. “We renewed the
popular camps under the name of self-defense.”

In 2019 a pro-democracy revolution put an end to al-Bashir’s
thirty-year rule. Over the months that followed, as Darfur’s non-Arab
communities saw a chance to reclaim their land, the self-defense
forces grew larger and stronger. Arab communities felt threatened, and
before long conflicts had reemerged across the province, including
unprecedented attacks by Arab militias against camps for displaced
people in West Darfur. The transitional government neglected the
warning signs, even asking the international peacekeepers of the
United Nations–African [Union] Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to withdraw.
At that point, Nyere told me, “we lost trust in the international
community.” The self-defense fighters had, he said, become “the only
force on the ground to face the RSF.”

Looking for allies, the RSF’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (known as
Hemetti), sought to co-opt the rebels he had once fought. In 2020 he
had a crucial part in brokering the Juba Peace Agreement, which
allowed the rebels to peacefully return. They settled mostly in North
Darfur, where they formed what they called Joint Forces to fill the
vacuum left by UNAMID’s departure and protect local communities. When
the new war began between the army and the RSF in April 2023, the
rebels were hesitant; many non-Arab Darfuris did not exactly mind
seeing their two former enemies fight each other in Khartoum. At first
they assumed that their already scorched province would be spared.

In fact it took less than two weeks for the war to spread to
El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. On one side were the RSF and
local Arab militias, on the other rebel and self-defense forces
belonging to the Masalit, the native non-Arab community. The RSF,
needing Darfur’s Arab militias to fight in Khartoum, could hardly hold
them back from continuing their old feuds, and soon Arab forces were
once again targeting non-Arab civilians. In mid-June, when the RSF
seized most of El-Geneina, thousands of Masalit civilians were killed;
most of the survivors walked to neighboring Chad.

In North Darfur, self-defense forces and rebels regretted that they
hadn’t supported their Masalit “comrades.” A few days after the
massacre, seventy-two traditional chiefs, mostly but not only Zaghawa,
met in a Dar Zaghawa village. “We had realized that the RSF were not
only fighting the army,” I was told by Omda Saleh, the
sixty-five-year-old chief of Um Baru, who chaired the meeting. They
decided to side with the army, both because they were convinced that
the RSF was targeting non-Arab communities and because they predicted
that even a weakened military would ultimately emerge victorious.

They also stepped up recruitment of self-defense fighters. The
“popular camps” of the 2000s had dispersed, Omda Saleh told me: “Some
had joined the rebels, and others had gone to look for gold in the
desert.” Now, he said, “they remobilized.” At the meeting the
traditional leaders coined a new name for the self-defense forces:
Khashin, the Arabic word for “rough,” which doubles as an approximate
acronym for “Popular Forces of Self-Defense.”

Shortly after the meeting the chiefs visited the rebel leaders and
stressed that they had to fight the RSF, but for some months the
rebels continued to equivocate. “Neutrality” had its advantages: the
rebels made money and improved their political leverage by escorting
convoys of trade, aid, and displaced civilians between army-controlled
eastern Sudan and RSF-controlled Darfur. By late 2023, though, the RSF
had taken not just El-Geneina but three of Darfur’s four other state
capitals. With only El-Fasher left uncaptured, most rebel leaders
announced that they were “abandoning neutrality.”

In El-Fasher and Dar Zaghawa, civilians mobilized into rebel groups
and self-defense forces alike. The self-defense units still mostly
focused on defending Dar Zaghawa and El-Fasher, but both also sent
troops to fight alongside the army in the Nile Valley. It was a risky
choice. In April 2025, as the army and its new Darfuri allies took
back Khartoum, the RSF retreated to Darfur and turned its focus to
El-Fasher. The siege tightened.

Many inhabitants of El-Fasher and the surrounding villages had by then
already fled to Zamzam, a camp for the displaced some ten miles to the
south, hoping it would offer more safety. By April Zamzam might have
been sheltering up to half a million people, making it, according to
the UN, the most populous such camp in Sudan.

Some of the displaced people, bracing for an attack, also took up
arms. Among them was a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Rim. In 2006,
when she was nine, the Janjaweed killed her father, who was fighting
with the rebels. She dropped out of school to help her mother, and the
family moved to El-Fasher. “I became a fighter because my father had
been killed and because of all the bad deeds of the Janjaweed, killing
people, raping the women,” she told me when we spoke at a
school-turned-shelter in Um Baru. “I was only ten and mostly helped
bringing water and food to the injured.”

Most women in the self-defense forces still limit themselves to those
support roles, but when she was still a child Rim started going in
secret to a house in El-Fasher where rebels offered firearms training.
When the war broke out in 2023 she also started volunteering for some
of the local NGOs and Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), then blooming
in El-Fasher and throughout Sudan, which tried to fill the gap left by
a deeply inadequate flow of international aid by providing food,
water, clothes, and health care. In Darfur, where they attracted not
just revolutionary youths but wealthy traders and other bigwigs, the
ERRs present themselves as apolitical humanitarian bodies, but for
volunteers like Rim there was hardly a contradiction between the
solidarity effort and armed self-defense. A former member of the
resistance committees that spearheaded the 2019 revolution, who now
works with an ERR, put it to me succinctly: “Some defend with guns,
others with food.”

Rim arrived in Zamzam in 2024, soon after the RSF started besieging
El-Fasher. She had already lost a cousin, two uncles, and an aunt;
they were driving a wounded man to the city’s only functional hospital
when their car was hit by a shell. It was in Zamzam, Rim told me, that
“I really became a fighter. As soon as I joined Zamzam, I got a gun. I
felt comfortable in that uniform.” (She was wearing it as we spoke.)
She became part of a group of sixty-three men and twenty-five women;
they called themselves Dugu Juwa, or “Hit Inside.”

Rim liked her busy life in Zamzam. From morning to evening she worked
as a volunteer in clinics or schools hosting newly displaced people,
“even under shelling.” She distributed food brought at night by
smugglers who followed secret routes on donkey carts. But as the siege
hardened, supplies diminished. “In the last months,” she said, “there
was little humanitarian work, so I spent most of my time with the
self-defense.” Her group watched distant RSF fighters and warned
children to hide in foxholes when the besiegers started shelling.

One day at the market Rim befriended a twenty-two-year-old fellow ERR
volunteer named Hanadi, who soon joined the self-defense forces and
won fame on social media after a video made the rounds of her joyfully
taunting the RSF, knife in hand. Hanadi was the daughter of a
fifty-seven-year-old rebel fighter named al-Nur Daud. Born near Um
Baru in the village of Bado Otola—“the gazelles’ pasture,” he told me,
only “now there are no more gazelles, because of the war”—al-Nur spent
a few years in the army until the 2003 rebel attack on El-Fasher
persuaded him to join the insurgency. It was during his three years in
the rebellion that Hanadi was born. She grew up in Zamzam, where she
trained as a midwife and learned first aid; during the transition her
father took up arms again, becoming a Khashin leader.

Pro-RSF social media users responded to the civilian mobilization in
defense of Zamzam with predictable hostility, arguing that the camp
had “militarized” and implying that its people were therefore
legitimate targets. In November 2024 forty-six largely Sudanese civil
society organizations signed a statement that echoed this rhetoric,
condemning the “massive mobilization of civilians” in Zamzam; Tom
Perriello, the US special envoy to Sudan, took note and called for the
camp’s “demilitarization.” In December, after the RSF shelled Zamzam,
fourteen of the statement’s signatories said that their names had been
used without their consent. A counterstatement accused the drafters of
forgery and charged them with providing justification for the RSF’s
attacks on civilians. Having held together against the al-Bashir
regime and the joint 2021 coup by the army and the RSF, Sudanese civil
society was coming apart.

On April 11, 2025, Rim went to the market in search of food. While she
was out the RSF attacked the part of the camp where her family lived;
gunmen entered her house looking for her. She returned to find her
sister shot dead.

That night the survivors buried her and other victims, but early the
next morning the attack resumed. An uncle fighting in El-Fasher told
Rim not to take up arms with her comrades. “Your father has been
killed, your sister has been killed,” she recalled him saying. “We
want revenge for you, but not for you to die.”

The next day the RSF took control of Zamzam. “We lacked ammunition and
didn’t receive support from El-Fasher,” Rim said. “Both Khashin and
Joint Forces had a big part in the defense, but the army didn’t do
anything. They said no plane could support us and no ammunition and
reinforcements could reach the camp.”

Rim and Hanadi both joined the battle. According to witnesses Hanadi
went first to a clinic managed by the NGO Relief International, where
the RSF had just executed nine aid workers, and found medicine to
treat the wounded. Then she went to fight. The attackers were seeking
her out: “Any girl they saw,” Rim said, “they asked, ‘Are you
Hanadi?’” Whether they recognized her is unclear, but when they
crossed paths with her they shot her at close range. “She was always
on the front line,” her father told me. During a first attack two
months earlier, “people said she stabbed more than ten Janjaweed.”
Generally, he said, “I told the women not to join the fight, but she
said she was ready to die.”

It was Rim’s first time fighting. “I shot,” she told me, “but I don’t
know if I managed to kill any RSF, and if so how many.” Soon her group
of twenty men and six women was overwhelmed. The RSF ordered them to
lay down their guns, and asked two men about Hanadi. They said they
didn’t know her and were immediately killed, as were several of the
other men. Then the RSF fighters told the women to take off their
uniforms. Those who refused were executed; the others were raped.
According to witnesses around half of the three to four hundred
self-defense fighters in Zamzam were killed in the attack.

It took Rim and an uncle a week to walk to El-Fasher, hiding in
villages on the way. Then, leaving him in the city, she walked three
more days to safer camps in Tawila, along a road that has become known
as Tariq al-Mawt (“Road of Death”).

She saw ten bodies by the side of the thoroughfare, likely killed by
thirst; most of the travelers here were women and children, the men
having either remained in El-Fasher or started walking off the road in
the dead of night.

From Tawila, like many other displaced people, Rim was able to buy a
ride in the back of a pickup truck to Um Baru. When we spoke there,
she was mourning her fallen comrades in Zamzam: of the forty fighters
in a WhatsApp group to which she belonged, only four had been
connecting since the attack. If she had a chance, she added, she would
fight again. Meanwhile she was praying: “God save everyone in
El-Fasher.”

By mid-October the news from the besieged city had grown more dire.
“Yesterday, the Janjaweed killed large numbers of people and burned
some 20 combat vehicles,” Khalil texted on October 18. “Now they are
preparing to attack again with artillery…. Suicide and combat drones
are bombing intensively throughout the city.” The next day Bakri
elaborated:

The RSF had many losses because they always bring child soldiers
without training. But we also have losses and injured. If it’s only
bullets against bullets, RSF are not strong, but the problem is the
bombings, the drones. For two days, I stayed at home. When I say I’m
fine I’m only speaking about my health but the situation is not fine.
We don’t have enough food.

Every few days groups of self-defense fighters managed to escape from
El-Fasher and reach Dar Zaghawa. On October 22 I came across an old
acquaintance among them. I first met Mohamed “Bazooka” on the
Chad–Sudan border in 2006, when he was a nineteen-year-old member of a
rebel group that had just captured an army garrison. Since then,
however, he has mostly fought within the self-defense forces, keen to
protect his area of Wadi Seyra, a wooded valley that often came under
attack from Arab militias.

When the war began in 2023 he was in Zamzam, where he started leading
a self-defense group called Nyagud (“Grab”). “We didn’t think the RSF
would attack Zamzam, since it was a camp for the displaced,” he told
me. But when the paramilitaries did invade,

Zamzam wasn’t protected enough. We had only small guns. We were too
weak, with no hospital to treat our wounded, and couldn’t even bury
the dead. The streets of Zamzam and the road to El-Fasher were full of
bodies, mostly women killed in the shelling and shooting, or hit with
cars.

After escaping along that road, he joined the self-defense in
El-Fasher. Most of his comrades there died in the shelling and
bombing. “Some get into foxholes,” he told me, but “others say they’re
happy to die and go to paradise. It’s very hot in foxholes, so I
preferred to hide behind a wall.” He suffered even more from hunger
than from shelling:

When a livestock owner was killed, people could take ambaz from his
stocks for free, but otherwise you had to buy it. Some, like me,
preferred to die than to eat animal food. We left it for women and
children. I know how to survive with little; I grew up in the bush.

People were greeting one another with a new saying: “The sauce has no
onions, and there’s no morning tea.”

Three times Bazooka joined groups of ten to fifteen fighters who rode
camels at night to Tawila in search of food. It was a dangerous
undertaking; the bush routes were dotted with the bodies of unlucky
smugglers. On their first trip the RSF killed eight of them, but the
survivors succeeded in fulfilling their task. The second time, the RSF
killed one of them and shot six of the group’s overloaded camels. By
September, when the RSF had finished building a forty-mile-long sand
wall around the city, smuggling food had become almost impossible. The
RSF’s strategy, initially aimed at emptying El-Fasher of its
inhabitants, had shifted toward trapping and starving them.

Bazooka and thirteen of his comrades decided to leave, but by then the
city was harder to escape. On their first two attempts the RSF
ambushed Bazooka’s group, killing six. Then Bazooka decided to try the
city’s notoriously dangerous eastern gate, now sarcastically nicknamed
the “Gate of Hope.” He made it, and after two weeks of walking and
riding borrowed camels he reached Wadi Seyra, at the southern edge of
Dar Zaghawa. His family hardly recognized him. When we spoke there a
few days after his arrival, he said that he, too, wanted to go back to
fight as soon as his health had recovered. But four days later
El-Fasher fell.

In Um Baru, relatives of fighters and civilians trapped in the city
expected that new escapees would soon reach Dar Zaghawa, but in the
first days no one showed up. Rumors spread that some survivors were on
their way, hiding from the drones that the RSF was launching across
the area. On October 29 a drone flew over Um Baru for five hours and
launched six bombs, killing two and injuring five, mostly civilians. I
joined many of the villagers in fleeing to the woods near the village,
where we hid under what trees we could find. The next day I left for
Chad alongside a good share of Um Baru’s inhabitants, some traveling
in cars coated in mud to make them less visible from the sky.

More escapees from El-Fasher reached the closer refuge of Tawila,
which over the past two years had already received 600,000 people
displaced by the siege. But new arrivals remained oddly few—roughly
10,000 people in the month following the fall of the city, ten times
less than after the attack on Zamzam. Médecins Sans Frontières, with
which I work as an adviser, found that 50 percent of three thousand
newly arrived adults were suffering from malnutrition, confirming the
Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s judgment that the city
was in the grip of famine.

Between 200,000 and 500,000 people are thought to have stayed in
El-Fasher until October 26, according to differing local and
international sources. The International Organization for Migration
estimates that close to 100,000 fled the city and surrounding villages
during and after the RSF takeover, mostly to rural areas nearby,
although that figure remains preliminary. Where are all the others? By
November 21, according to a Yale University project monitoring the
situation using satellite footage, there were “no current patterns of
life visible” in the city that were “consistent with civilian
presence.” Satellite pictures showed bloodstains on the soil and “at
least 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains,” some
actively burning; in some cases objects visible one day seemed to have
been buried the next.

One of the first fighters confirmed dead on social media was Khalil
Daosa. The RSF, it was reported, killed him when his convoy tried to
force its way across the sand wall. Two months after the fall, there
was still no news from Bakri, although his family had paid $8,000 to
RSF members who claimed, without any proof, that he was in their
hands. Such payments have increased, with ransoms now reaching
$40,000.

On December 24 the RSF launched another attack on Dar Zaghawa. This
time it had more success, capturing Abu Gamra and Um Baru before
withdrawing from the latter. Two hundred people were reportedly killed
and over seven thousand displaced to the bush. Rim is said to be among
the escapees, although since then her WhatsApp has gone dark. The
fighting is ongoing, and meanwhile starvation in the area continues to
spread. Immediately before the attack a UNICEF survey found that over
half of the children under five in and around Um Baru—including some
displaced from El-Fasher—were suffering from acute malnutrition.

“I have no news from my family, my uncles, my brothers, my cousins,
all of them,” Rim messaged me in our last exchange.

My mother and brother were in El-Fasher, I don’t know if they’re alive
or dead. All my friends from ERRs or self-defense died in El-Fasher at
the hands of the RSF. All were killed, I swear…. I’m scared, I swear.
________________________________

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Emmanuel Berbain, the
nutrition expert at Médecins Sans Frontières who blew the whistle on
starvation at Zamzam.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/12/darfurs-endless-war-el-fasher-tubiana/

END
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John Ashworth

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