This image grab taken from handout video footage released on Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Telegram account on October 26, 2025, shows RSF fighters holding weapons and celebrating in the streets of El-Fasher in Sudan’s Darfur.
| Photo Credit: AFP
Reports were mounting on Tuesday (October 28, 2025) of ethnically motivated atrocities in the western Sudanese city of El-Fasher since its capture by paramilitaries, with allies of the Army accusing fighters of executing “more than 2,000” civilians.
El-Fasher fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after more than 18 months of brutal siege warfare, giving the group control over every state capital in the vast Darfur region.
Allies of the Army, the Joint Forces, said on Tuesday that the RSF “committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians in the city of El-Fasher, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly”.
Local groups and international NGOs had warned that El-Fasher’s fall could trigger mass atrocities, fears that Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab said were coming true.
The monitor, which relies on open source intelligence and satellite imagery, said the city “appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution”.
This included what appeared to be “door-to-door clearance operations” in the city.
In a report published on Monday, it said the actions of the RSF “may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide”.
The same day, UN rights chief Volker Turk spoke of a growing risk of “ethnically motivated violations and atrocities” in El-Fasher.
His office said it was “receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions”.
Pro-democracy activists, meanwhile, said El-Fasher residents had endured “the worst forms of violence and ethnic cleansing” since the RSF claimed control.
A video released by local activists and authenticated by AFP shows a fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range.
The paramilitaries have a track record of atrocities, having killed as many as 15,000 civilians from non-Arab groups in the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina.
The Army, which has been fighting the RSF since April 2023, has also been accused of war crimes.
Published – October 28, 2025 10:19 pm IST
