More than 2,000 people, mainly women and children, have been executed in the last 48 hours in Sudan after the city of El-Fasher was captured by paramilitaries.
The western Sudanese city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after more than 18 months of brutal siege warfare, giving the group control over every state capital in the vast Darfur region.
The RSF 'committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians in El-Fasher, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly'.
Local groups and international NGOs had warned that El-Fasher's fall could trigger mass atrocities, fears that came true.
The monitor, which relies on open source intelligence and satellite imagery, said the city 'appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution'.
This included 'door-to-door clearance operations' in the city.
A video released by local activists and authenticated by AFP shows a fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range.
The actions of the RSF 'may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide'.
More than 2,000 civilians have been reportedly executed in the last 48 hours in Sudan after the city of El-Fasher was captured by paramilitaries
A video released by local activists and authenticated by AFP shows a fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range
Screen grab shows a gunman pointing his weapon at unarmed civilians
The same day, UN rights chief Volker Turk spoke of a growing risk of 'ethnically motivated violations and atrocities' in El-Fasher.
His office said it was 'receiving multiple, alarming reports that the Rapid Support Forces are carrying out atrocities, including summary executions'.
Pro-democracy activists, meanwhile, said El-Fasher residents had endured 'the worst forms of violence and ethnic cleansing' since the RSF claimed control.
The paramilitaries have a track record of atrocities, having killed as many as 15,000 civilians from non-Arab groups in the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina.
The northeast African nation was plunged into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions about the future of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the head of the paramilitary rebel group erupted.
Fighting exploded in the capital Khartoum but rapidly spread, where it is now estimated that at least 150,000 people have been killed, including many civilians.
The civil war has forced more than 14 million people to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine swept parts of the country.
An investigation by Amnesty International suggests that RSF rebels have waged a calculated campaign of sexual violence against defenceless civilians, using rape, murder and torture to terrorise, demoralise and subjugate the population living in areas they seized.
This image grab taken from handout video footage released on Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Telegram account on October 26, 2025, shows RSF fighters holding weapons and celebrating in the streets of El-Fasher in Sudan's Darfur
The paramilitaries have a track record of atrocities, having killed as many as 15,000 civilians from non-Arab groups in the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina
In this satellite photo provided by Planet Labs PBC, the area around the headquarters of the Sudanese military's 6th Division in el-Fasher, Sudan, is seen
The army, which has been fighting the RSF for two-and-a-half years, has also been accused of war crimes.
More than a year and a half of siege warfare made El-Fasher one of the grimmest places in a war that the UN has labelled among the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Displacement camps outside the city were officially declared to be in famine, while inside it, people turned to animal fodder for food.
The UN warned before the city's fall that 260,000 people remained trapped there without aid, half of them children.
The African Union's chairman Mahmoud Ali Youssouf on Tuesday expressed 'deep concern over the escalating violence and reported atrocities', and condemned 'alleged war crimes and ethnically targeted killings of civilians'.
The Sudanese army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said on Monday that his forces had withdrawn from El-Fasher 'to a safer location', acknowledging the loss of the strategic city.
He pledged to fight 'until this land is purified', but analysts said that Sudan was now effectively partitioned along an east-west axis, with the RSF having already set up a parallel government.
Alan Boswell, project director for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group, told AFP: 'The longer this war drags on, this division will likely only grow more concrete and harder to unwind.'
Anwar Gargash, an adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, called the city's capture a 'turning point' that showed 'the political path is the only option to end the civil war'.
Screen grab shows unarmed civilians running away as they are chased by paramilitaries
The UAE has been accused by the UN of supplying the RSF with weapons, a charge it denies. It is also a member of the so-called Quad - alongside the United States, Saudi Arabia and Egypt - which is working for a negotiated peace.
The group has proposed a ceasefire and a transitional civilian government that excludes both the army and the RSF from power.
Talks last week in Washington involving the Quad made no progress.
The army has its own foreign backers in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey, observers have reported. They too have denied the claims.
In March, the army retook full control of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, but with both sides now having achieved significant gains neither appears willing to compromise in negotiations.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15234329/civilians-women-children-executed-Sudanese-city-paramilitary-group.html
Maternity hospital massacre leaves 460 dead: Fresh horror in Sudan as patients and staff are butchered, after 2,000 civilians were executed in two days
A maternity hospital massacre in Sudan has left 460 people dead just days after a 48-hour killing spree saw more than 2,000 civilians executed by paramilitary rebels.
The World Health Organisation said the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, the city's last remaining hospital, was on Sunday 'attacked for the fourth time in a month, killing one nurse and injuring three other health workers'.
Two days later, 'six health workers, four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist, were abducted' and 'more than 460 patients and their companions were reportedly shot and killed in the hospital,' by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries, the organisation said.
Footage purportedly capturing the aftermath of the hospital massacre showed bodies scattered across the floor among debris and broken equipment.
'I was performing surgery in the hospital when heavy shelling occurred. A mortar hit the hospital. I was so worried because the woman's wounds were open, and everyone was running around me,' Dr Suhiba, a gynaecologist, told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
The northeast African nation was plunged into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions about the future of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the head of the paramilitary rebel group erupted.
Following the most recent incident, allies of the army, the Joint Forces, said on Tuesday that the RSF 'committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly'.
The World Health Organisation said the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, the city's last remaining hospital, was on Sunday 'attacked for the fourth time in a month, killing one nurse and injuring three other health workers'
Footage purportedly showing the aftermath of the massacre captured bodies scattered across the floor amid debris
The total death toll could not immediately be confirmed, but shocking satellite images taken after the fall of El Fasher showed evidence of the mass killings.
Body-sized objects were seen in satellite images clustered around vehicles and nearby an RSF sand berm built around the city. There were reports of civilians being gunned down as they attempted to break out and flee the bloodshed.
Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects 'consistent with the size of human bodies' and 'reddish ground discolouration' thought to be either blood or disturbed soil.
A video released by local activists and authenticated by AFP on Tuesday showed a fighter known for executing civilians in RSF-controlled areas shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range.
Another video purportedly showed a child soldier murdering a grown man in cold blood, while one other clip showed RSF fighters executing civilians just moments after pretending to release them.
A report published on Monday said the actions of the RSF 'may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide'.
Mohammad Hamdan Daglo, the head of the RSF has vowed the country would be unified by 'peace or through war'.
The capture of El-Fasher, the last army holdout in the vast western region of Darfur, comes after more than 18 months of brutal siege, sparking fears of a return to the ethnically targeted atrocities of 20 years ago.
UN chief Antonio Guterres called for an immediate end to military escalation in Sudan on Thursday after reports of the maternity hospital atrocity.
Guterres said in a statement he was 'gravely concerned by the recent military escalation' in El-Fasher, calling for 'an immediate end to the siege & hostilities'.
International powers have struggled for months to mediate an end to the fighting between the paramilitaries and the regular army, raging since April 2023.
Daglo's paramilitaries now control most of western Sudan, Africa's third-largest country, while the regular army under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan dominates the north, east and centre.
Bodies and blood: The sand around the western city of El Fasher is now stained red with pools of blood so thick they can be seen from space
While the army regained full control over the capital Khartoum in March, the RSF has set up a parallel administration in the southwestern city of Nyala.
Analysts warn that the country is now de facto partitioned and may prove very hard to piece back together.
Daglo said in a speech Wednesday that he was 'sorry for the inhabitants of El-Fasher for the disaster that has befallen them' and that civilians were off limits.
The RSF - descended from Janjaweed militias that attacked non-Arab communities in Darfur two decades ago - has again been accused of carrying out ethnic genocide against civilians, with graphic videos circulating on social media.
Sudanese Arabs are the dominant ethnic group in the country, but the majority in Darfur are from non-Arab communities such as the Fur people.
The seizing of El-Fasher has left the RSF in control of a third of Sudan, with fighting now concentrated in the central Kordofan region.
On Tuesday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported five Sudanese volunteers killed and three missing in Bara, a city in Kordofan captured by the RSF last week.
More than 33,000 people have fled El-Fasher since Sunday for the town of Tawila, about 40 miles to the west, which has already welcomed more than 650,000 displaced people.
AFP images from Tawila showed displaced people, some of them with bandages, carrying their belongings and setting up temporary shelters.
Around 177,000 people remain in El-Fasher, which had a population of more than one million before the war.
Access routes to El-Fasher and satellite-based communications in the city remain cut off - though not for the RSF, which controls the Starlink network there.
Sudan's war has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and triggered the world's largest displacement and hunger crisis.
Fighting exploded in the capital Khartoum but rapidly spread, where it is now estimated that at least 150,000 people have been killed, including many civilians.
The civil war has forced more than 14 million people to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine swept parts of the country.
An investigation by Amnesty International suggests that RSF rebels have waged a calculated campaign of sexual violence against defenceless civilians, using rape, murder and torture to terrorise, demoralise and subjugate the population living in areas they seized.
The army, which has been fighting the RSF for two-and-a-half years, has also been accused of war crimes.
The so-called Quad group - comprising the United States, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia - held talks over several months towards securing a truce.
But those talks have reached an impasse, an official close to the negotiations said, with 'continued obstructionism' from the army-aligned government.
While diplomats have preached peace, outside powers, including Quad members, have been accused of interfering in the conflict.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15241379/Maternity-hospital-massacre-leaves-460-dead-Fresh-horror-Sudan-patients-staff-butchered-2-000-civilians-executed-two-days.html
Pool of blood: Civilians were gunned down as they attempted to break out and flee the bloodshed
The paramilitaries have a track record of atrocities, having killed as many as 15,000 civilians from non-Arab groups in the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina
Unarmed civilians running away as they are chased by paramilitaries
Displaced Sudanese sit next to a bullet-riddled wall
Local residents cheer as soldiers arrive
Sudan's army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan
Acting Minister of Justice of Sudan, Muawia Osman Mohamed Khair (L), and Ambassador Omaima Alsharief (R) of Sudan attend public hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, the Netherlands
Yunis Ali Ishag, 60 from Geneina in West Sudan whose leg was amputated after he was shot by RSF soldiers
Abdel Azim Khater, 32, who was shot multiple times as he tried to make his way on foot from El Geneina to Chad, shows one of his wounds
The Sudanese insurgent militia known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the city of al-Fashir and raided its last functioning hospital this week, reportedly killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands of others.
The civilian transitional government of Sudan was overthrown in a 2021 coup led by Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The RSF is a paramilitary group descended from the infamously brutal Janjaweed militia, which began as gangs of Arabic-speaking nomads that were armed and turned into shock troops by former dictator Omar al-Bashir. The U.S. government accused the Janjaweed of committing genocide in 2004.
Burhan and Dagalo turned against each other in 2023, launching an incredibly brutal civil war marked by atrocities against civilians from both sides. Over 40,000 people have been killed in the war so far, by the most conservative estimate, and some 12 million have been driven from their homes. The United Nations considers Sudan to be one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
The city of al-Fashir was the last stronghold of the SAF in the Darfur region. It was under siege from RSF forces for over 500 days before it was overrun by Dagalo’s militia, which many local residents still refer to as the Janjaweed.
“The Janjaweed showed no mercy for anyone,” one local resident said of the slaughter that began on Sunday.
“It was like a killing field,” said another. “Bodies everywhere, and people bleeding, and no one to help them.”
Eyewitnesses reported RSF fighters went house-to-house after they took control of al-Fashir, beating and shooting civilians, including women and children. Some of the victims died in the streets from their wounds. Eyewitnesses also reported cases of torture and sexual assault.
The invading force soon converged on the Saudi Maternity Hospital, the last functioning hospital in al-Fashir, and began attacking staff and patients.
The Sudan Doctors Network said the RSF “cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards.”
The World Health Organization condemned the attack on Thursday, reporting that at least 460 patients and their companions were killed, along with numerous health workers who were either killed or kidnapped.
W.H.O. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “appalled and deeply shocked” by the attack on the hospital.
“Prior to this latest attack, WHO has verified 185 attacks on health care in Sudan with 1204 deaths and 416 injuries of health workers and patients since the start of the conflict in April 2023. Forty-nine of these attacks occurred this year alone, killing 966 people,” he noted.
W.H.O. called for “an immediate end to hostilities in al-Fashir and all of Sudan,” plus protection for civilian and humanitarian workers, and unimpeded access to humanitarian aid. According to the U.N. organization, some 200,000 people are trapped in occupied al-Fashir and dealing with an outbreak of cholera, while supplies of food and medicine are dwindling.
“With fighters pushing further into the city and escape routes cut off, hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped and terrified — shelled, starving, and without access to food, healthcare or safety,” said U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher.
The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at the Yale School of Public Health published a report on Monday that said mass executions in al-Fashir were visible in satellite photographs. The photos also revealed large portions of the city were “carpet-bombed” by the SAF during their struggle to retain control.
“Al-Fashir appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution,” the HRL said.
“The actions by RSF presented in this report may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity (CAH) and may rise to the level of genocide,” the report concluded.
At a press briefing in Geneva on Friday, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) estimated that hundreds of civilians have been killed or taken captive since the RSF overran al-Fashir.
“Witnesses confirm RSF personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint, forcing the remaining displaced persons — around 100 families — to leave the location amid shooting and intimidation of older residents,” said OHCHR spokesman Seif Magango.
The U.N. Security Council (UNSC) issued a statement on Thursday condemning the RSF assault on al-Fashir and demanding immediate “de-escalation.”
UNSC “condemned reported atrocities being perpetrated by the RSF against the civilian population, including summary executions and arbitrary detentions, and expressed grave concern at the heightened risk of large-scale atrocities, including ethnically motivated atrocities.”
Gen. Mohamed Dagalo, the RSF commander commonly known by his nickname “Hemedti,” issued a brief statement on Thursday amid growing international outrage at the actions of his forces.
Dagalo said he felt “sorry” for the suffering inflicted on al-Fashir, and said “violations” by his soldiers would be “investigated” by a committee that just arrived in the conquered city. Skeptical observers noted that Dagalo has promised to “investigate” RSF atrocities before but has never made good on those promises. Meanwhile, other RSF spokesmen denied that a slaughter was perpetrated at the Saudi Maternity Hospital.
https://www.breitbart.com/africa/2025/10/31/hundreds-killed-as-sudanese-militia-overrun-last-hospital-in-darfur/
Members of the RFS celebrating in the street
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