U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.
| Photo Credit: AP

Only a few thousand Sudanese have reached the nearest camp for displaced in the days since Sudan’s paramilitary forces seized el-Fasher city, raising fears over tens of thousands who might still be trapped as survivors described killings and other atrocities, an aid group said on Sunday (November 2, 2025).

The Rapid Support Forces took control of the western Darfur region last week, after ousting the rival Sudanese Army from the city that was besieged for 18 months.

Since then, reports and videos have circulated of RSF atrocities against civilians including beatings, killings and sexual assaults, according to testimonies by civilians and aid workers. The dead included at least 460 killed in the hospital, according to the World Health Organisation.

Tens of thousands are believed to have fled el-Fasher, according to the UN migration agency. However, less than 6,000 have made it to the nearest camp in Tawila, 65 kilometres away, said Shashwat Saraf, Sudan director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs the camp.

Almost 1,000 people arrived in the last three days, he said.

“The numbers are still very few. We are not seeing the hundreds of thousands that we were expecting. If people are still in el-Fasher, it will be very difficult for them to survive,” he told The Associated Press by phone from Tawila.

Survivors describe dodging gunmen as they fled el-Fasher

The fall of el-Fasher marked a new turning point in the war between the RSF and Sudan’s armed forces, which erupted in April 2023. More than 40,000 people have been killed, according to UN figures, but aid groups say the true number could be many times higher.

The war has also displaced more than 14 million people and unleashed outbreaks of diseases, killing thousands.

“We feel that a lot of people are stuck in locations from where it is not safe for them to move, and they need to pay to move and they don’t have money to pay,” Mr. Saraf said.

Survivors who made the journey on foot have shared harrowing details of having to dodge gunmen shooting at them as they fled.

“People arriving in the camp are mostly disoriented and dehydrated with bruises all over. Sometimes they do not even remember their names, they have to be taken to the hospital and have IV fluids,” Mr. Saraf said.

Mr. Saraf also said that around 170 unaccompanied children, some of whom as young as 3 years old, trekked to Tawila without knowing where their family members were. They came along with older children or adults who were not their relatives.

Sudan’s official accuses UAE of backing a “terrorist organisation”

In a news conference on Sunday, Sudan’s ambassador in Cairo, Imadeldin Mustafa Adawi, accused the RSF of carrying out war crimes in el-Fasher.

Mr. Adawi said that his government would not negotiate with the RSF, urging the international community to designate the group as a terrorist organisation.

“The government of Sudan is calling on the international community to act immediately and effectively rather than just make statements of condemnation,” Mr. Adawi said.

Mr. Adawi renewed his government’s accusations that the United Arab Emirates has been arming the RSF, insisting that the Gulf state should not be involved in any mediation efforts.

The UAE has backed the RSF and opposed the Sudanese military, pointing to the Army’s ties to Islamic forces that Abu Dhabi has long opposed. The UAE has denied the accusations despite evidence to the contrary.

When asked earlier on Sunday about his country’s support for the RSF, senior UAE diplomat Anwar Gargash did not directly answer the question while attending the annual Manama Dialogue security summit in Bahrain.

He said that the international community made a “critical mistake” in supporting both the military leader, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and his rival, RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, when the Army ousted a Western-backed power-sharing government in 2021.

“We all made the mistake when the two generals who are fighting the civil war today overthrew the civilian government,” Mr. Gargash said. “That was, in my opinion, looking backwards was a critical mistake. We should have put our foot down — all of us collectively.”

The UAE supports a three-month humanitarian ceasefire, with the two parties negotiating and a civilian transitional government formed in nine months, he said.

There are mounting fears that the RSF may expand its military campaign toward the country’s centre once again, buoyed by its seizure of the entire Darfur region.

Twelve people were killed, including at least five children, in RSF attacks on two camps sheltering displaced people in the central Kordofan region, the Sudan Doctor Network, a medical group tracking the war, said on Saturday.

Published – November 03, 2025 02:26 am IST

Shelling by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed at least seven people and wounded 71 others in El-Fasher, a medical source said Sunday, as the paramilitary group launched its fiercest offensive yet on the besieged city.

El-Fasher, the last major city in the vast western Darfur region still under army control, has become the most violent front line in the war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted in April 2023.

In recent weeks, paramilitary forces have escalated their long-running siege, launching fierce artillery barrages and ground incursions into densely populated neighbourhoods, the city’s airport and the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp.

The few hospitals still operational have been repeatedly bombarded and the local police headquarters captured by the RSF.

The medical source, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the true toll from Saturday’s attack was “likely higher”, as many injured had been unable to reach the hospital due to the intensity of the RSF’s strikes.

Among the wounded, mostly suffering from shrapnel injuries, 22 were reported to be in a critical condition, according to the source, who was reached via satellite internet to bypass a communications blackout.

Local activists said the attack struck several neighbourhoods in the city’s west near the airport, which RSF forces have sought to capture.

‘Kill box’

The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, is seeking to wrest full control of the region from the army after being pushed out of the capital Khartoum earlier this year.

Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab revealed Thursday that the RSF had constructed more than 31 kilometres of berms — raised earth barriers — “creating a literal kill box” in the city, the report said.

Its imagery also identified munitions impact damage at the city’s water authority, which supplies El-Fasher with fresh drinking water.

Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said the RSF had confined the Sudanese army and its allied militias to less than five square kilometres in the city.

“It’s the smallest it’s been since the siege began,” he told AFP.

The besieged population — estimated by the UN at some 300,000 — has endured severe shortages of water and food for over a year, according to humanitarian workers.

Famine was officially declared in three displacement camps around El-Fasher last year, and the UN warned it could spread to the city itself by last May.

A lack of data has so far prevented an official declaration of famine, but the UN estimates that nearly 40 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, with 11 percent severely so.

Many have resorted to eating animal fodder, while desperate attempts to escape into the desert often end in death from exposure, starvation or violence.

‘Massacres’

“The pattern of life is ending,” said Raymond.

“They are dying in poverty, crossfire and bombardment and they’re being killed as they’re trying to leave,” he added.

Yale’s satellite images show that cemeteries had been expanded over the past months.

“The most worrisome part will be when there’s no one left to dig the graves anymore.”

The RSF, which recently announced the formation of a parallel government in the region, would control all five Darfur state capitals if it were to successfully capture El-Fasher.

Experts have warned that the city’s non-Arab Zaghawa tribe may face a similar fate to the non-Arab Massalit tribe in West Darfur’s state capital of El-Geneina, where UN experts found up to 15,000 people, mostly from the tribe, were killed in 2023 massacres blamed on RSF forces.

Both warring sides have been accused of war crimes, but the RSF has, in particular, been accused of genocide, sexual violence and systematic looting.

In the early 2000s, the paramilitary force led a government-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000 people.

“The Janjaweed are about to win the entire genocide that began in the early 21st century,” Raymond said.

“And the world isn’t going to do anything about it.”

Published – August 31, 2025 10:33 pm IST