The Fall of El Fasher: Mass Killings After an 18-Month Siege
El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the Sudanese Armed Forces' last stronghold in Darfur, was besieged by the RSF for 18 months beginning in May 2024, with the siege intensifying after the RSF was pushed out of Khartoum in mid-2025. The RSF built a high earthen berm encircling the city, trapping roughly 260,000 civilians inside and cutting off food and aid.
The city fell on 26 October 2025. The UN Human Rights Office, based on interviews with over 140 victims and witnesses in Sudan's Northern state and eastern Chad, documented at least 4,400 people killed within El Fasher and over 1,600 more along exit routes as they fled in the first three days -- a total exceeding 6,000, which it says is undoubtedly an undercount of the week-long offensive's true toll.
One of the deadliest single incidents occurred when around 500 people were killed as RSF fighters opened fire with heavy weapons on a crowd of roughly 1,000 people sheltering at the Al-Rashid dormitory of El Fasher University on 26 October.
"Like a scene out of a horror movie."
On the same day, a witness reported RSF fighters rounding up about 300 young men in the Daraja Oula neighborhood, dividing them into groups of 30, then opening fire on each group until there was no movement, lobbing grenades at some, and deploying a gas burner against others, systematically executing all those detained.
Ahead of the final assault, RSF forces killed at least 300 people over two days in the Abu Shouk displacement camp just outside the city. Only about 40% of El Fasher's 260,000 residents are believed to have escaped alive; the fate of the rest remains unknown.
A commander identified by survivors as "Abu Lulu" was reported to have executed detainees in trenches, shot a pregnant woman dead after asking how far along she was, and told prisoners he would kill them while marching them to El Fasher University, one of the largest execution sites.
"Like fat autumn locusts."
BBC Verify geolocated and analyzed videos showing fighters executing wounded survivors found among piles of bodies at the university.
Sudanese medical and civil-society sources, including the Sudanese Coordination of Resistance Committees, reported that at Al Saudi Hospital, the sick and injured were left to die.
"Executed in cold blood."
Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab satellite imagery corroborated clusters of objects consistent with human remains appearing outside hospitals in the days after the takeover.
In February 2026 the UN's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the killings, sexual violence, and destruction in and around El Fasher bore the hallmarks of genocide and were part of a planned and organized operation, not random wartime excess -- a finding covered in the ethnic-cleansing/genocide article in this series.
Sources
- UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) -- Primary report documenting mass killings, based on 140+ victim/witness interviews
- Al Jazeera -- Reporting on the OHCHR report, including the Daraja Oula mass execution detail
- BBC News -- Coverage of the 6,000-killed-in-3-days finding
- BBC Verify -- Video and satellite analysis of the massacre at the university building and the "Abu Lulu" executions
- New York Times -- Reporting on the "Abu Lulu" commander and berm/siege details
- DW (Deutsche Welle) -- Reporting on Al Saudi Hospital executions and satellite corroboration