An atrocity foretold: genocidal slaughter in El Fasher
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John Ashworth
Oct 31, 2025, 6:42:02 AM (9 days ago) Oct 31
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An atrocity foretold: How the RSF siege of El Fasher turned into
genocidal slaughter
Communication networks are down but a deluge of shocking videos point
to mass killings on a devastating scale.
Ahmed Gouja
The New Humanitarian
30 October 2025
Editor's note: This analysis is based on open-source video evidence,
interviews with people who escaped El Fasher, and information from
sources within both the army and the RSF.
NAIROBI
In one video, dozens of bodies lie strewn on the floor of a building
as militiamen move through, checking that no one is still alive. A man
in a white jalabiya – seemingly the only survivor – is shot dead.
“Finished,” a fighter says in Arabic as they walk out.
In another video, fighters stand in a trench, guns raised, shouting
cries of victory. All around them lie corpses in the sand, as vehicles
burn in the distance – presumably vehicles that those people had tried
to use to escape.
In a third video, a different group of fighters force six men to lie
face down on the ground. A captive is kicked in the head, as the group
are called slaves and ordered to bleat like sheep.
Communication networks are down in the Darfur city of El Fasher,
making it hard for journalists and human rights defenders like me to
document what has happened since the paramilitary-turn-rebel Rapid
Support Forces (RSF) seized control over the weekend.
But a deluge of shocking videos – mostly filmed and posted online by
RSF fighters – along with satellite images, point to mass killings on
a devastating scale that could be the worst yet seen in Sudan’s more
than two-and-half-year war.
Civil society groups believe thousands of people have been killed over
recent days, including nearly 500 at the city’s only partially
functioning hospital. The killings have been so extensive that blood
and dead bodies are now visible from space.
Many who escaped the massacres have been kidnapped by the RSF and
affiliated camel-riding and motorbike-riding militiamen who profit
from despair. I have spoken to several people who have been bankrupted
as they try to pay ransom fees to release relatives.
The fall of El Fasher means all of Darfur’s main cities are now under
the control of the RSF – a force composed largely of Darfuri Arab
fighters that succeeded the Janjaweed militias responsible for the
mass killings of non-Arab Darfuris in the 2000s.
The capture cements the de facto partition of Sudan – which is
experiencing the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises –
between RSF-held and army-held regions.
But neither the RSF’s control, nor its announcement of a rival
administration, makes it a legitimate government. It does not serve
civilians and support schools and hospitals; it rules through brute
force and extracts resources from a now-exhausted population.
Warnings ignored
What makes matters worse is that the crimes committed in El Fasher
were long telegraphed and long foreseen: For more than 500 days, the
RSF subjected the city to a brutal siege in an attempt to dislodge the
national army – supported by allied armed groups – from its last major
holdout in Darfur.
Nearly 300,000 civilians who remained in the city were falsely branded
as collaborators of anti-RSF forces, sealing a fate that was obvious
given the RSF’s atrocities in other parts of Darfur and across Sudan.
Yet warnings were unheeded, civilians were left defenseless, and the
RSF’s main patron – the United Arab Emirates – continued to receive
arms (including from many Western nations) even as it passed them on
to a genocidal militia.
In the days before the city’s fall, several groups of army personnel
left their base – coordinating and paying RSF fighters to ensure safe
passage – according to my sources. Hunger, and the RSF’s increased use
of drones, had forced them to fold.
Egged on by an international diaspora of hateful RSF TikTokers, and
seeking revenge for fellow fighters who were killed in the battle for
El Fasher, the RSF soon began its appalling rampage.
The videos circulating widely online – some verified by open-source
investigators and human rights defenders – show fighters revelling in
their actions and humiliating victims with dehumanising and
supremacist language.
Some Darfuris are now watching massacre videos and discovering that
their family members are among the casualties, or seeing missing
relatives in footage showing large groups of people who have been
detained.
The crimes of Abu Lulu
Several videos show an individual known as Abu Lulu – a lionised RSF
fighter whose real name is Brigadier General Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris –
travelling from place to place, mercilessly executing people.
Many of Abu Lulu’s victims were killed in a trench that had been dug
by the RSF earlier this year around El Fasher to tighten the siege.
Wearing a white scarf, he can be seen posing among corpses, grinning
and holding his gun aloft.
“Look at all these people I killed,” he tells a man lying in a ditch
in one video. A fellow RSF fighter says the man is wounded and
suggests clemency, but Abu Lulu refuses. “I will not give you any
mercy, I will not forgive you,” he says, before shooting him dead.
“Hemedti is the best,” he says to a line of people in another video,
referring to the RSF’s leader. The people say the words back but it
doesn’t spare them. “I don’t want to waste my time with you,” Abu Lulu
says as he shoots them one by one.
However shocking, it should be remembered that these are just the
videos that have reached us so far. When you think of the many
massacres that weren’t published, you get a sense of the scale of the
atrocities that have taken place.
That the RSF have filmed themselves engaging so openly in atrocity
crimes demonstrates the profound lack of accountability that has
accompanied the group throughout this conflict, and long before it.
Still, those being filmed, like Abu Lulu, remain relatively small
fish. Top commanders, including Abdul Rahim Dagalo, the RSF deputy
leader, are currently present and overseeing operations in El Fasher,
and they must be held accountable for the actions of their fighters.
It is RSF commanders who have also allowed individuals like Abu Lulu
to stay on the front lines, even as he has been documented committing
abuses in El Fasher for many months, and before that in Khartoum and
the Kordofans.
It is also the RSF’s top leadership that had directed the shelling of
El Fasher for 18 months while denying humanitarian agencies access to
the city and nearby camps – a siege that led to widespread famine
conditions.
In the weeks before the city fell, I heard from one woman who said the
animal feed (ambaz) that people were relying on had become too
expensive, that mutual aid groups were on their knees, and that water
was so restricted that people had stopped bathing.
The only bits of food remaining, the woman said, were the seeds of a
tree that people never used to eat. More bitter than lemon, you have
to soak them in water for a week to remove the taste.
Profiting from misery
Some of those who survived Abu Lulu’s bullets and other RSF killers
are now walking along the road towards Tawila, the main town that has
been receiving El Fasher’s displaced in recent months.
But the passage is stalked by RSF fighters and allied militias, who
run trafficking networks to Tawila, and who loot, abduct, and kill
those who don’t pay. Families split up and try different routes to
maximise the chance that at least somebody will survive.
Those I spoke to in recent days who made the journey successfully
described seeing scores of dead bodies along the way: some shot by
militiamen, others dying from wounds inflicted by the RSF in El
Fasher, and others from hunger and thirst.
One man said the journey took him three days, and that he avoided
RSF-affiliated groups by travelling at night. He said he passed groups
of women and children who were too exhausted to keep moving.
Another woman said she left for Tawila a day before the RSF took
control of El Fasher – a stroke of luck, she said, because it meant
there were fewer armed men on the roads as they were all heading
towards the city.
Still, in Tawila – which is now hosting hundreds of thousands of
people – she said she has no food or shelter. During the day, she uses
her clothes and a blanket to create a makeshift cover from the sun; at
night, they become her mattress and duvet.
“I don’t want to stay here forever,” she said, adding that thousands
of people are arriving every day in an even worse state, having
suffered far more on the journey.
I also spoke to one person who said three relatives who took different
routes to Tawila were all separately captured by militiamen since the
weekend. The family then received messages demanding thousands of
dollars.
People have already lost everything during the siege, and yet the RSF
and affiliated militias are somehow turning their flight for survival
into a form of profit.
It is a reminder that, for the RSF, war is also about financial gain.
The siege was not just in place for military reasons; RSF fighters
profited by smuggling food into El Fasher, charging traders who were
doing the same, and taking a cut to facilitate people’s exits.
International solidarity needed
It is not lost on me that these killings took place just as the RSF
was participating in US-sponsored talks that some expected would
produce a three-month nationwide ceasefire.
This is not the first time the RSF has launched offensives and
committed horrific abuses against civilians while taking part in
supposed peace negotiations, which it uses as political cover.
As we watch events in El Fasher, many of us have given up on the
illusion of international protection. The UN and the African Union
have proved unwilling or unable to act; their mechanisms crippled by
the interests of powerful states.
The message the group is sending to the international community is
unmistakable: we can sit with you at the table, but our killing
machine will keep running.
What we need now is international solidarity – ordinary people, civil
movements, and rights defenders who are willing to confront the
governments and companies complicit in this war.
That means calling out the UAE for funding and arming the RSF,
exposing the Western governments that continue to trade with it, and
taking action against the companies whose weapons and vehicles are
turning up on Darfur’s killing fields.
If nothing is done, Darfur will continue to burn, which for those who
have survived RSF attacks is unthinkable. As the woman who arrived in
Tawila just before the RSF seized El Fasher told me: “I would rather
die than go through this again.”
Edited by Philip Kleinfeld.
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2025/10/30/atrocity-foretold-how-rsf-siege-el-fasher-turned-genocidal-slaughter
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
genocidal slaughter
Communication networks are down but a deluge of shocking videos point
to mass killings on a devastating scale.
Ahmed Gouja
The New Humanitarian
30 October 2025
Editor's note: This analysis is based on open-source video evidence,
interviews with people who escaped El Fasher, and information from
sources within both the army and the RSF.
NAIROBI
In one video, dozens of bodies lie strewn on the floor of a building
as militiamen move through, checking that no one is still alive. A man
in a white jalabiya – seemingly the only survivor – is shot dead.
“Finished,” a fighter says in Arabic as they walk out.
In another video, fighters stand in a trench, guns raised, shouting
cries of victory. All around them lie corpses in the sand, as vehicles
burn in the distance – presumably vehicles that those people had tried
to use to escape.
In a third video, a different group of fighters force six men to lie
face down on the ground. A captive is kicked in the head, as the group
are called slaves and ordered to bleat like sheep.
Communication networks are down in the Darfur city of El Fasher,
making it hard for journalists and human rights defenders like me to
document what has happened since the paramilitary-turn-rebel Rapid
Support Forces (RSF) seized control over the weekend.
But a deluge of shocking videos – mostly filmed and posted online by
RSF fighters – along with satellite images, point to mass killings on
a devastating scale that could be the worst yet seen in Sudan’s more
than two-and-half-year war.
Civil society groups believe thousands of people have been killed over
recent days, including nearly 500 at the city’s only partially
functioning hospital. The killings have been so extensive that blood
and dead bodies are now visible from space.
Many who escaped the massacres have been kidnapped by the RSF and
affiliated camel-riding and motorbike-riding militiamen who profit
from despair. I have spoken to several people who have been bankrupted
as they try to pay ransom fees to release relatives.
The fall of El Fasher means all of Darfur’s main cities are now under
the control of the RSF – a force composed largely of Darfuri Arab
fighters that succeeded the Janjaweed militias responsible for the
mass killings of non-Arab Darfuris in the 2000s.
The capture cements the de facto partition of Sudan – which is
experiencing the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises –
between RSF-held and army-held regions.
But neither the RSF’s control, nor its announcement of a rival
administration, makes it a legitimate government. It does not serve
civilians and support schools and hospitals; it rules through brute
force and extracts resources from a now-exhausted population.
Warnings ignored
What makes matters worse is that the crimes committed in El Fasher
were long telegraphed and long foreseen: For more than 500 days, the
RSF subjected the city to a brutal siege in an attempt to dislodge the
national army – supported by allied armed groups – from its last major
holdout in Darfur.
Nearly 300,000 civilians who remained in the city were falsely branded
as collaborators of anti-RSF forces, sealing a fate that was obvious
given the RSF’s atrocities in other parts of Darfur and across Sudan.
Yet warnings were unheeded, civilians were left defenseless, and the
RSF’s main patron – the United Arab Emirates – continued to receive
arms (including from many Western nations) even as it passed them on
to a genocidal militia.
In the days before the city’s fall, several groups of army personnel
left their base – coordinating and paying RSF fighters to ensure safe
passage – according to my sources. Hunger, and the RSF’s increased use
of drones, had forced them to fold.
Egged on by an international diaspora of hateful RSF TikTokers, and
seeking revenge for fellow fighters who were killed in the battle for
El Fasher, the RSF soon began its appalling rampage.
The videos circulating widely online – some verified by open-source
investigators and human rights defenders – show fighters revelling in
their actions and humiliating victims with dehumanising and
supremacist language.
Some Darfuris are now watching massacre videos and discovering that
their family members are among the casualties, or seeing missing
relatives in footage showing large groups of people who have been
detained.
The crimes of Abu Lulu
Several videos show an individual known as Abu Lulu – a lionised RSF
fighter whose real name is Brigadier General Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris –
travelling from place to place, mercilessly executing people.
Many of Abu Lulu’s victims were killed in a trench that had been dug
by the RSF earlier this year around El Fasher to tighten the siege.
Wearing a white scarf, he can be seen posing among corpses, grinning
and holding his gun aloft.
“Look at all these people I killed,” he tells a man lying in a ditch
in one video. A fellow RSF fighter says the man is wounded and
suggests clemency, but Abu Lulu refuses. “I will not give you any
mercy, I will not forgive you,” he says, before shooting him dead.
“Hemedti is the best,” he says to a line of people in another video,
referring to the RSF’s leader. The people say the words back but it
doesn’t spare them. “I don’t want to waste my time with you,” Abu Lulu
says as he shoots them one by one.
However shocking, it should be remembered that these are just the
videos that have reached us so far. When you think of the many
massacres that weren’t published, you get a sense of the scale of the
atrocities that have taken place.
That the RSF have filmed themselves engaging so openly in atrocity
crimes demonstrates the profound lack of accountability that has
accompanied the group throughout this conflict, and long before it.
Still, those being filmed, like Abu Lulu, remain relatively small
fish. Top commanders, including Abdul Rahim Dagalo, the RSF deputy
leader, are currently present and overseeing operations in El Fasher,
and they must be held accountable for the actions of their fighters.
It is RSF commanders who have also allowed individuals like Abu Lulu
to stay on the front lines, even as he has been documented committing
abuses in El Fasher for many months, and before that in Khartoum and
the Kordofans.
It is also the RSF’s top leadership that had directed the shelling of
El Fasher for 18 months while denying humanitarian agencies access to
the city and nearby camps – a siege that led to widespread famine
conditions.
In the weeks before the city fell, I heard from one woman who said the
animal feed (ambaz) that people were relying on had become too
expensive, that mutual aid groups were on their knees, and that water
was so restricted that people had stopped bathing.
The only bits of food remaining, the woman said, were the seeds of a
tree that people never used to eat. More bitter than lemon, you have
to soak them in water for a week to remove the taste.
Profiting from misery
Some of those who survived Abu Lulu’s bullets and other RSF killers
are now walking along the road towards Tawila, the main town that has
been receiving El Fasher’s displaced in recent months.
But the passage is stalked by RSF fighters and allied militias, who
run trafficking networks to Tawila, and who loot, abduct, and kill
those who don’t pay. Families split up and try different routes to
maximise the chance that at least somebody will survive.
Those I spoke to in recent days who made the journey successfully
described seeing scores of dead bodies along the way: some shot by
militiamen, others dying from wounds inflicted by the RSF in El
Fasher, and others from hunger and thirst.
One man said the journey took him three days, and that he avoided
RSF-affiliated groups by travelling at night. He said he passed groups
of women and children who were too exhausted to keep moving.
Another woman said she left for Tawila a day before the RSF took
control of El Fasher – a stroke of luck, she said, because it meant
there were fewer armed men on the roads as they were all heading
towards the city.
Still, in Tawila – which is now hosting hundreds of thousands of
people – she said she has no food or shelter. During the day, she uses
her clothes and a blanket to create a makeshift cover from the sun; at
night, they become her mattress and duvet.
“I don’t want to stay here forever,” she said, adding that thousands
of people are arriving every day in an even worse state, having
suffered far more on the journey.
I also spoke to one person who said three relatives who took different
routes to Tawila were all separately captured by militiamen since the
weekend. The family then received messages demanding thousands of
dollars.
People have already lost everything during the siege, and yet the RSF
and affiliated militias are somehow turning their flight for survival
into a form of profit.
It is a reminder that, for the RSF, war is also about financial gain.
The siege was not just in place for military reasons; RSF fighters
profited by smuggling food into El Fasher, charging traders who were
doing the same, and taking a cut to facilitate people’s exits.
International solidarity needed
It is not lost on me that these killings took place just as the RSF
was participating in US-sponsored talks that some expected would
produce a three-month nationwide ceasefire.
This is not the first time the RSF has launched offensives and
committed horrific abuses against civilians while taking part in
supposed peace negotiations, which it uses as political cover.
As we watch events in El Fasher, many of us have given up on the
illusion of international protection. The UN and the African Union
have proved unwilling or unable to act; their mechanisms crippled by
the interests of powerful states.
The message the group is sending to the international community is
unmistakable: we can sit with you at the table, but our killing
machine will keep running.
What we need now is international solidarity – ordinary people, civil
movements, and rights defenders who are willing to confront the
governments and companies complicit in this war.
That means calling out the UAE for funding and arming the RSF,
exposing the Western governments that continue to trade with it, and
taking action against the companies whose weapons and vehicles are
turning up on Darfur’s killing fields.
If nothing is done, Darfur will continue to burn, which for those who
have survived RSF attacks is unthinkable. As the woman who arrived in
Tawila just before the RSF seized El Fasher told me: “I would rather
die than go through this again.”
Edited by Philip Kleinfeld.
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2025/10/30/atrocity-foretold-how-rsf-siege-el-fasher-turned-genocidal-slaughter
END
______________________
John Ashworth
ashwor...@gmail.com
+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)
PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya
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