SUDAN paramilitary fighters separated families and murdered children in front of their parents as tens of thousands remain trapped inside devastated El-Fasher.
Fleeing survivors revealed the horrors inflicted on them by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who seized the city last week in one of the deadliest episodes in the country’s two-year civil war.
Germany’s top diplomat Johann Wadephul described the situation in Sudan as “apocalyptic” while fresh satellite images suggested mass killings were likely ongoing.
At war with the regular army since April 2023, the RSF pushed the military out of its last stronghold in the vast Darfur region after a grinding 18-month siege.
In just 48 hours, more than 2,000 civilians were “executed and killed”, according to the Sudanese army’s Joint Forces.
Since the takeover, reports have emerged of summary executions, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions, while communications remain largely cut off.
Zahra, a mum-of-six who yesterday fled El-Fasher to the nearby town of Tawila, said: “I don’t know if my son Mohamed is dead or alive. They took all the boys.”
Before reaching the nearby RSF-controlled town of Garni, she said RSF fighters stopped them and took her sons, aged 16 and 20.
“I begged them to let them go,” she said, but the fighters only released her 16-year-old son.
Another survivor, Adam, said two of his sons, aged 17 and 21, were killed in front of him.
He said: “They told them they had been fighting (for the army), and then they beat me on my back with a stick.”
In Garni, RSF fighters saw the blood of Adam’s sons on his clothes and accused him of being a fighter. After hours of investigations, they let him go.
The survivors’ full names have been withheld for their safety.
Speaking in Bahrain on Saturday, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper condemned “atrocities, mass executions, starvation and the devastating use of rape as a weapon of war” in Darfur.
She said: “In Sudan right now, there is just despair.”
The UN says more than 65,000 people have fled El Fasher since Sunday but tens of thousands remain trapped.
Around 260,000 people were in the city before the RSF’s final assault.
A spokesperson from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned “large numbers of people” remain in “great” danger.
“They are being prevented by the RSF and its allies from reaching safer areas,” they said.
The group said that only 5,000 people had managed to make their way to Tawila, about 80km (50 miles) west of El-Fasher.
But according to MSF’s head of emergencies, Michel Olivier Lacharite said, the numbers of people arriving in Tawila “don’t add up, while accounts of large-scale atrocities are mounting”.
Several eyewitnesses told MSF that a group of 500 civilians, along with soldiers from the military and the army-allied Joint Forces, had attempted to flee on Sunday, but most were killed or captured by the RSF and their allies.
Survivors reported that people were separated based on their gender, age or presumed ethnicity, and that many were still being held for ransom.
Darfur is home to a number of non-Arab ethnic groups, who make up a majority of the region’s population, in contrast to Sudan’s dominant Sudanese Arabs.
Hayat, a mother of five who fled the city, previously said that “young men travelling with us were stopped” along the way by paramilitaries and “we don’t know what happened to them”.
‘World’s worst humanitarian crisis’
Last week, the UN Human Rights Office said it had received “multiple, alarming reports that the RSF are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions.”
Yvette Cooper said: “We are witnessing a deeply disturbing pattern of abuses in El Fasher, including systematic killings, torture, and sexual violence.”
The RSF, largely drawn from Arab militias once known as the Janjaweed, stands accused of repeating the genocidal tactics it unleashed in Darfur 20 years ago.
The group has been fighting Sudan’s army since April 2023, when a power struggle between Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti) exploded into full-scale civil war.
Since then, 14 million people have been displaced and up to 150,000 killed, according to humanitarian agencies.
The UN calls it the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Before El Fasher fell, the city had been under siege for 18 months. Over 260,000 civilians, half of them children, were trapped without food or medicine. Many were eating animal fodder to survive.
Now, the RSF controls every Darfur state capital, effectively partitioning Sudan.
Analysts say the army’s withdrawal marks a turning point — and perhaps the death of a united Sudan.
General al-Burhan said his forces had pulled back “to a safer location” but vowed to fight “until this land is purified.”
The European Union said it was “deeply concerned” and urged all sides to de-escalate. “There can be no impunity,” said EU foreign affairs spokesman Anouar El Anouni.
UN rights chief Volker Türk warned that the risk of “ethnically motivated violations and atrocities” was “mounting by the day.”
