One year after the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) massacred tens of thousands of civilians in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in war-torn Sudan, the city remains largely depopulated.
Vegetation is claiming what used to be busy markets and roads. Hospitals are bombed out and empty, and the mass graves are quiet. This is the picture painted by the satellite imagery analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) in a report titled “El-Fasher, One Year Later.”
Human activity is largely limited to just five of the city’s 24,307 square kilometers, in the Daraja Oula neighborhood, where RSF troops are based. Except for the market in this neighborhood, none of the city’s other eight markets show signs of human activity.
Six of them have been bombed, and two others subsequently fell into dilapidation. “At least five markets have vegetation overgrowth indicating an absent pattern of life,” stated the report, published on October 28, marking the anniversary of the fall of El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur region to hold out against the RSF.
The RSF had captured the rest of this vast region, consisting of five states, soon after starting the war in April 2023 against its former partner in the military junta, the national army, called the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
SAF’s only major base in this region was in El Fasher. Following a 20-month-long siege – starving the population with famine by cutting off food supplies – the RSF, which had been repeatedly bombing its hospitals and markets, finally launched a ground invasion on October 26.
The SAF did not send reinforcements or air support. Many of its troops surrendered or fled. The local youth, organized as the Popular Resistance, took to the trenches and held out for nearly three days until the evening of October 28, when El Fasher’s Resistance Committee announced that “the last resisting soldier fired his last bullet” and “then fell as a martyr.”
***Read more: El Fasher’s last stand: “The city has fallen, but its dignity has not”***
RSF troops went on a killing spree, neighborhood to neighborhood, door to door, to depopulate the city. Daraja Oula, presently the only neighborhood with signs of human activity centered around the RSF, was the last civilian refuge in El Fasher. “Yale HRL identified burning activity consistent with human remains at 19 locations [in this neighborhood],” added the HRL report published on the first anniversary.
One of the locations is right outside the Al-Saudi Hospital. Attacking the hospital, the RSF “executed physicians, nurses, hospital staff, patients, and their families.”
The bloodshed was so enormous that satellite photos showed reddish discoloration of the ground in many areas. Many of these red patches were strewn with “objects” measuring “approximately 1.3 – 2.0 meters, which is the expected range of a human body of average height lying horizontally,” HRL reported on October 28, 2025.
As it continued to massacre civilians over the next days, satellite images as of November 1, 2025 showed at least 150 “clusters of objects consistent with human remains”, added a subsequent HRL update, which concluded that the “RSF has systematically killed and disposed of a number of objects consistent with human remains, likely in the tens of thousands.”
***Read more: RSF has burnt and buried tens of thousands of corpses in El Fasher, says Yale report***
The report on October 28, 2026, the anniversary of the fall of El Fasher, reiterates this estimation, pointing out that 70,000 people are missing. They are neither visible in satellite images nor in the records of humanitarian organizations in Tawila, where survivors who managed to flee have taken refuge in IDP camps.
A UN fact-finding mission concluded in February that RSF’s mass killings had the “hallmarks of genocide”. Now in November, the RSF continues the war in its fourth year, and the UAE continues to supply it with arms and vehicles, through Chad in Sudan’s west and Ethiopia in its east.
Read more: The war in Sudan is “between two wings of a comprador parasitic capitalist class”
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