It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe.
Mass killings are under way. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – patients and their families – were killed. The few that managed to escape tell of summary executions of civilians. The RSF has embarked on a killing spree of civilians so severe that images of blood saturating the ground have been picked up by satellite. The speed and intensity of the killings in the immediate aftermath of the fall of El Fasher has already been compared by war monitors to the first 24 hours of the Rwandan genocide.
