EP 22: Tragedy in Sudan: The Fall of El Fasher

For over 500 days, the people of El Fasher held out under a brutal siege. When the city finally fell, the world witnessed one of the deadliest mass-killing events of the war in Sudan. Through survivor testimonies, satellite evidence, and international reporting, I examine how it happened, who enabled it, and what El Fasher asks of us now. 

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Transcript

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Imagine a city of about a quarter million people, a city roughly the size of buffalo. Now imagine that as war spreads across the region, people flee there from every direction. Villagers escaping massacres, families carrying their children, entire communities uprooted. Over time, that city swells. Half a million, then more. By 2024 when the fighting reached its peak, more than a million people were trapped inside its limits. That's more people than live in San Francisco, trapped inside a 35 mile dirt wall. That city is El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and in April, 2024, the rapid support forces began in closing it. Satellite imagery. The same tools used to document mass killings elsewhere, showed a continuous sand berm encircling the city. It wasn't built for defense. It was built to cut El Fasher off. a wall to stop food, water, and escape. UN investigators, aid agencies, and journalists all warned the same thing. El Fasher was being prepared for something catastrophic. Inside conditions collapsed. Hospitals ran out of supplies. Civilians went days without food. Many survived on grass and animal feed. Food meant for livestock, not human beings. Crossing RSF controlled roads meant risking capture, assault, or execution. For more than 500 days, El Fasher held out. A siege more than three times longer than Stalingrad, the longest and most brutal siege of the 20th century. And the entire time everyone in the city understood exactly what would happen if the RSF broke through the final defenses. They had seen. What happened in El Genina, in Barra across Darfur, inside El Fasher. The greatest fear wasn't death.. It was survival. Living long enough to endure what happens when a militia notorious for massacres and ethnic killing storms a city already starved. On October 26th, 2025, that fear became reality. El Fasher fell. What followed wasn't chaos. It wasn't the fog of war. It was a continuation of a pattern of atrocities that had been ongoing for nearly two years. One documented by survivors, human rights groups, UN investigators and satellite imagery, and that leads to a harder question, one that turns us from a local horror into a global story. How was the RSF able to sustain this war at all? How did a militia with no factories, no air force and limited logistics wage, a countrywide conflict for two years and build a siege wall visible from space? To answer that, we have to look beyond Sudan's borders. Because this genocide wasn't just executed. It was enabled. If you want to understand how El Fasher fell, how a city became a prison, how starvation was used as a weapon, how a genocide unfolded in slow motion. You have to understand one thing. The rapid support forces, or RSF, did not wage this war alone. That isn't speculation. It's the conclusion of US intelligence. UN investigators and every major regional reporting effort. And the clearest summary of that reality comes from one of the most experienced US officials on Sudan. Cameron Hudson, former chief of staff to successive of US special envoys for Sudan. He told the Wall Street Journal"the war would be over if not for the UAE. The only thing keeping the RSF in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support they're receiving from the Emiratis". Everything that follows; the drones, the ammunition, the fuel, the vehicles, the private military contractors, flows from that. Because for two years, investigators have traced the same pattern. The United Arab Emirates has been supplying the RSF through regional partners. When you start digging into how the RSF was supplied, the trail of evidence extends far beyond Sudan. It goes through airports, border crossings, and desert airstrips scattered across East and North Africa. One of the earliest known locations was in Entebbe, Uganda. In June of 2023, A UAE cargo plane landed on what was described as a humanitarian mission. But when airport staff opened the crates, they didn't find medicine or food. They found rifles and ammunition. According to workers who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. After that discovery, they were told to stop inspecting Emirati flights altogether, and once inspection stopped, those flights increased. They weren't staying in Uganda. They were heading west towards one of the most unlikely logistics hubs in Africa. Amdjarass, a small desert town in Eastern Chad. Multiple investigations, Reuters, UN experts, satellite analysts, all converge on the same picture. UAE planes landed in Amdjarass. cargo, was unloaded onto the tarmac. From there. RSF aligned convoys carry the shipments across the desert, a steady line of trucks moving into Darfur. Over time, Amdjarass became the Airbridge, the logistical heart of the RSF's war. If you travel north from Amdjarass, you'll find a second major route. One that runs straight through Eastern Libya territory. Controlled by Khalifa Haftar, one of the UAE's closest regional partners. For years, UN investigators have documented how the Emiratis moved weapons into Libya to support Haftar's forces. and Reuter's flight analysis shows that many of the same airlines previously accused of ferrying Emirati weapons to Haftar in 2019 and 2020 are now operating in the Amdjarass airlift. That's the connective tissue. Haftar's units move supplies and personnel across desert roads into Western Sudan. Not through improvised smuggling paths, but through longstanding Emirati backed networks repurposed for a new war. There's an Eastern corridor too. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters both tracked UAE Linked Flights making stops in Somalia, mainly in Basaso, the Port City in Puntland. Why Basaso? The UAE has spent years tightening its grip there, investing in the port, expanding security ties, and operating a military base. This wasn't the backup route. It was an alternate lane. In the same system, a system designed with a redundancy. If one route became politically sensitive, the other stayed open. That's not how a militia operates. That's how a state level logistics network functions. And you can see that system most clearly in the drones. US intelligence agencies and battlefield imagery analyzed by the journal confirmed that the RSF began operating Chinese made Rainbow Series drones, including the CH 95. These drones fly for 24 hours, conduct long range surveillance and fire precision weapons. And here's the detail that matters. Only China and the UAE possess these drones. And China isn't taking sides in Sudan. So if the RSF is flying CH 95's over North Darfur. They didn't come from Beijing, they came from UAE. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab even spotted aircraft matching their profile in the skies above El Fasher during RSF operations. It wasn't just drones moving through these routes. Investigators also traced European made components into the RSF arsenal, including Serbian made mortars and British made vehicle engines moving through the same Emirati networks that previously armed militias in Libya. According to the New Yorker, some of these shipments crossed the Chad border disguised as humanitarian aid, while others were air freighted through a UAE base in Somalia, the very routes already tied to Emirati cargo flights. Then there's a Colombian contractor story, the clearest sign of how far this network extends. In late 2024, the Colombian outlet, La Silla Vacia, revealed that hundreds of retired Colombian soldiers had been recruited through a UAE linked private military company with promises of oil refinery security jobs. But once they arrived in UAE, everything changed. They were flown to Benghazi, Libian forces aligned with Khalifa haftar confiscated their passports, held them in barracks, and eventually pushed them in convoys across the desert. By early 2025, close to 380 of them had been moved into Sudan, many assigned to train RSF fighters, including teenagers, while others were pulled directly into combat. One contractor Christian Lombana had his leg crushed during a desert ambush. Sudanese forces recovered his Colombian ID and posted it online. And in a separate geo-located video, another Colombian contractor was seen firing an RSF mortar inside the El Fasher theater. Taken as a whole, their testimonies point to one conclusion. A UAE connected recruitment pipeline that moved foreign fighters across three countries and deliver them directly into the RSF ranks. Sudan's filing before the International Court of Justice ties all of this information together. Investigators traced weapons used by the RSF backed to UAE serial numbers. They identified armored vehicles registered to Emirati Companies. Financial records showed bank transfers routed through UAE institutions moving money that paid for equipment transport and fighters. And RSF soldiers themselves described training that took place on UAE funded bases supported by Emirati personnel. Individually these details could look isolated, but what the ICJ filing shows is that they operate in sequence; weapons, vehicles, financing, training, all reinforcing one another as parts of a single state backed system. And US officials watched the whole thing unfold. According to Reuters, when American diplomats confronted Emirati delegates with the intelligence; the drones, the cargo flights, the land routes, the UAE dropped its denials. Once the evidence was laid out, they didn't claim the shipments were humanitarian anymore. But even after that quiet admission, nothing meaningful changed. No sanctions, no public designations, no diplomatic cost. The supply lines kept running and the wall around El Fasher kept tightening. Once you lay out the supply chain, the next question becomes unavoidable. Why is United Arab Emirates doing this? Why pour drones, weapons, fuel, contractors, and money into a militia that is torn Sudan apart? To understand that? You have to understand two things, Sudan, strategic value and the historical and political breakdown that allowed foreign powers to exert their influence. Sudan is one of the most resource rich countries in Africa. It's the third largest producer of gold on the continent, and most of that gold is mined informally, which makes it extremely easy to smuggle. A huge amount of it flows straight into Dubai. The commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates and the political authority behind that trade, the decisions, the networks, the security apparatus sits in Abu Dhabi, the UAE's capital. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are two centers of power inside the same state. A small but extremely wealthy gulf monarchy with outsized influence across Africa and the Middle East. And it isn't just gold. Sudan holds reserves of oil. Uranium copper, iron ore, and rare minerals. Resources that become far easier to seize, smuggle, and exploit when the state collapses and oversight disappears. Then there's geography. Sudan controls more than 450 miles of Red Sea coastline, one of the most strategic shipping corridors on Earth. This is why the Emiratis had already invested billions in Sudanese agriculture, land, and infrastructure, and why in 2022, Abu Dhabi signed a$6 billion agreement to build a deep water port on Sudan's Coast. Sudan's civilian government later canceled that project, a major blow to the UA E's commercial and strategic ambitions. But strategic value alone doesn't explain how Sudan unraveled. To understand how Sudan reached this moment you have to look at the forces that shaped it, who the RSF are, and what the Sudanese people tried to build during the 2019 revolution. The Rapid support forces or RSF were created in 2013 out of the Janjaweed, the Arab militias Omar al-Bashir deployed during the Darfur genocide beginning in 2003, who were responsible for killing up to 300,000 people and displacing more than 2.5 million. And because there was never any real accountability for those crimes, the Janjaweed weren't dismantled. They were rebranded. Expanded and eventually formalized into the RSF. That impunity is a straight line from Darfur in 2003 to Darfur Today. In 2017, a law formalized the RSF as an independent paramilitary force with its own command structure, budget, and authority. Under its Commander Mohammad Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the RSF expanded rapidly seizing goldmines in Darfur, and building a vast cross-border business and smuggling network. By the time of the revolution, the RSF had become one of the most powerful armed actors in the country, a parallel military with regional backing and its own financial empire. Then in 2019, ordinary Sudanese led by women studentsand neighborhood resistance committees rose up against Omar Al Bashir's 30 year dictatorship. They forced him out in April, 2019. It was one of the most powerful pro-democracy uprisings in the region, but the military, the Sudanese armed forces, or SAF, under general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, on one side, and the RSF under Hemedti on the other co-opted that revolution instead of completing it. They sidelined that civilian leadership and created a military dominated transitional government. Sudan Analyst, Shayna Lewis explained it best to Mehdi Hasan."The SAF and RSF are two sides of the same coin. This isn't a war of RSF versus SAF. It's a war of RSF and SAF against the Sudanese people. The only way they could dismantle the revolution was to tear the country apart, and that shows you just how powerful that movement really was." That betrayal, that collapse of the democratic transition created the vacuum that foreign powers rush to fill. Iran backed to Sudanese army. Russia through Wagner backed the RSF. Egypt and Saudi Arabia aligned with the military, and the United Arab Emirates stepped in deeper than anyone with money, weapons, drones, contractors, and logistics, all for the RSF. For the UAE, the RSF solved two problems at once. Strategically, they acted as a counterweight to Iran's influence through Sudan's Army, secured Emirati access to the Red Sea, and placed a loyal force on key transit corridors. Economically, they controlled the gold, the borders, and the smuggling routes that fed Dubai markets. And when the RSF suffered its biggest defeat losing Khartoum in March, 2025, that should have ended the war. Instead, it was the moment that UAE increased its support. More drones, more flights, more weapons, more foreign contractors, more money. Everything we now know about this conflict points in the same direction. The RSF did not sustain itself. Its ability to keep fighting and to keep encircling cities like El Fasher depended overwhelmingly on the Emiratis. Once you see that clearly the fall of El Fasher stops looking like the inevitable collapse of a vulnerable city. It begins to look like something else, entirely. A war shaped, financed, and sustained by a powerful US ally with virtually no consequences for the role it played. We've spent a lot of time talking about supply chains, drones, port deals, and geopolitical bets. None of that is the core of the story. The real story is about the people left inside that berm, the 35 mile sand walls surrounding El Fasher. Inside what Yale's team now called the Killbox. In reporting by the new Arab. A 33-year-old civil society worker named Rashida Ishaq describes the morning The RSF entered her neighborhood in northern El Fasher. RSF fighters burst into her home. Within minutes, they shot her uncle dead in the living room. Later that day, they marched her and hundreds of others under armed guard to a public square near a UNICEF office. Families were herded into makeshift detention areas. Men and boys were separated. She watched as more than 20 men, both young and elderly, were executed with direct shots to the head and chest."They shot children in front of us". She said"some, not even five years old". It all unfolded,she recalled,"amid women's screams and Children's wailing". All the while they were demanding money from terrified families. Those who could pay often through mobile banking apps had some chance of being released. Those who couldn't faced execution. Rashida's family ended up paying roughly 25 million Sudanese pounds, about$1,700 in gold jewelry to get out. Even then, they had to flee along roads still patrolled by RSF fighters, passing elderly and sick people collapsing along the way. Her story isn't an isolated horror. In the same New Arab piece. Ahmed Ali Suleman 37 describes getting a call that his younger brother Shamar had been detained at El Fasher's Northern Gate. The captors demanded 50 million Sudanese pounds, about$3,300, within three hours. Emad didn't have that much. He begged them to accept 5 million as a first payment. They agreed. He sent the money through a mobile app from the Bank of Khartoum. Hours later, when he called back, they told him"Your brother went to heaven". He later learned that his brother had been killed, along with everyone else detained at that spot. This wasn't an accident or a misunderstanding. It was deliberate. Families were forced to empty their savings, anything of value, paying ransoms in the hope that their loved ones might live. Some were released, many were not. Survivor testimonies from the SIHA Network, the strategic initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa fill in the larger pattern. By early November, SIHA had verified detailed cases of widespread rape and assault by the RSF against women and girls fleeing El Fasher. along with killings, abductions, disappearances and deliberate targeting indigenous African communities like the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa. One survivor described an older man trying to protect them from RS F soldiers. They said,"you girls come this way and told the old man to go. He said,'I cannot leave my daughters'. They killed the old man. His son was crying.'My father. My father', and they killed the boy too. Then they turned to her and her sister. They took my sister, she's 14 years old. I said,'I will go instead of my sister. She is sick'. They said,'either we rape you or we take your daughter'. I said,'rape me, but leave my daughter'. So they beat me and raped me." Another woman describing her escape on the road to Tawila, told SIHA;,"They shouted,‘You are Zaghawa, aren’t you?’ We told them,'no, we are not'. They raped me. They degraded us. They tortured us. In front of me they killed a woman. My daughter screamed and ran." To get out. Many were forced to pay ransoms ranging from the equivalent of$100 to$8,000. Those who couldn't pay, are beaten, subjected to sexual violence or disappeared. SIHA is blunt about what all of this adds up to."These acts aren't random or isolated. They reflect a coordinated effort of persecution and a continuation of a two decade campaign of extermination against indigenous African communities in Darfur". If Rashida, Ahmed, and the SIHA testimonials, show us what this looks like on the ground. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab show us what it looked like from orbit. Satellite imagery reviewed by Yale's team and cited in the New Yorker show clusters of bodies arranged in shapes analyst is called C and J positions. Those shapes aren't arbitrary. A C shape is the way a body falls when someone is shot while running. A J is how a person collapses when they fall on their knees or on their side as they die. From space those bodies are surrounded by bloodstains visible on satellite imagery. The kind of pigment spread you only see when killings happen at scale. Nathaniel Raymond, head of the Yale HRL, who has analyzed atrocity imagery for 15 years. Described what his team saw as"tens upon tens of thousands of potential dead in five days". Yale's analysts also identified multiple execution sites, not just scattered killings and a pattern of mass violence that matched survivor reports exactly. Al Jazeera's analysis of Yale's findings backs all of this up. Clusters of bodies that were not there before the RSF entered the city. Pools of blood that appear only after the offensive began and the unmistakable signs of mass killing. Based on their analysis, Raymond and his team estimate that 160,000 to 250,000 people remain in El Fasher after the siege broke, but they are not seeing typical patterns of life for a city with that many people. That, typically implies one of three things. People are dead captured or in hiding. In the weeks following El Fasher's fall, the Yale team believe the RSF have entered the body disposal phase. Bodies are being moved, piled, burned, hidden. An attempt to cover the scale of what happened. The New Yorker puts it plainly. The only modern comparison is Rwanda, where nearly a million people were killed in just three months. What the satellites are showing us is not just evidence of a massacre. It is evidence of something far larger, a mass killing event with no modern parallel outside of a genocide UN reporting confirms with the survivor testimonies and satellite imagery have already shown. What happened inside El Fasher is systematic ethnic cleansing, and the scale of the killings is staggering. At least 2000 civilians killed in just two days, including nearly 500 people inside the Saudi maternity hospital alone. At the UN Security Council, humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, put it this way,"women and girls are being raped, people are being mutilated and killed with utter impunity, we cannot hear the screams, but as we sit here today, the horror is continuing." The un fact finding mission on Sudan describes a deliberate pattern of ethnically targeted executions, sexual violence, mass force displacement, and the destruction of vital infrastructure. And warns that as El Fasher burns in millions face starvation, the world has to choose between silence or solidarity. And SIHA after gathering survivor testimonies across Darfur, ends its report with a line that should haunt us all."Every moment of inaction is a choice, one that sides with the perpetrators". What makes the atrocities inside El Fasher even harder to comprehend is that many of them weren't discovered months later by investigators. They were already circulating online, filmed by RSF fighters themselves. One of the clearest examples comes from the New Yorkers reporting on an RSF Brigadier General named Alfateh Abdullah Idris, wildly known as Abu Lulu. The day after El Fasher fell a video spread across social media. Nine men sit slumped along a dirt road, wrists hanging over their knees, heads bowed. RSF fighters stand over them. One holds a whip. Then another man walks into frame with a Kalishnakov. It's AB Lulu. He moves down the line and shoots each man at close range. The last man crosses his arm over his head trying to protect himself before the bullets throw him backward. Other RSF fighters join in firing into the bodies. And the reason anyone saw this video is simple. Abu Lulu posted it, openly. Later, after he was briefly detained and released, he streamed again on TikTok. In that livestream, he claimed he had fulfilled a lifelong goal killing 2000 people, and said he was starting to count over from zero. Abu Lulu wasn't the only one documenting the violence. The New Yorker reports that RSF fighters posted other videos from El Fasher. Shouting God is great over corpses, flashing victory signs with rifles raised, even forcing men to dig their own graves. None of this was leaked, none of it was uncovered by accident. It was the RSF publicly displaying what they were doing inside El Fasher, confident that no one was going to stop them. For nearly two years, the team at Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab wasn't just documenting RSF attacks, they were warning the world about exactly what was coming. According to the New Yorker and Raymond's own public statements. HRL submitted more than 60 briefings to UN officials, US agencies, and humanitarian partners. Not vague alerts, detailed assessments, predicting the siege, the encirclement, and the likely outcome if the RSF ever breached El Fasher. And yet the response from the international system and from Washington never matched the scale of the danger. In late 2024, Raymond resigned from the Biden administration over their unwillingness to act on the intelligence. Not because the data was unclear, but because the political cost of confronting the UAE, A central partner in the Abraham Accords was deemed too high. Raymond has said publicly that even minor targeted economic pressure on Abu Dhabi could shift the calculus, but that pressure never came. And so, as Raymond put it, El Fasher became the"most precisely warned atrocity in modern history." El Fasher wasn't a tragedy that emerged out of thin air. It was the kind of atrocity that world sees coming and still allows to happen. And that's the part that makes this moment so hard to sit with.. The realization that the failures in Sudan aren't isolated. They echo failures we're watching in Gaza and in so many places around the world where the phrase never again has lost its meaning. As Nathaniel Raymond put it,"we've gone from never again to all the dang time." For him. That pattern leads back to something Frederick Douglass wrote more than a century ago. A truth that still explains why atrocities continued long after the warnings begin."Power concedes nothing without a demand". However, he then adds something of his own saying that it's up to the people to make that demand. Because"when we stop engaging in the necessary delusion that we can do something, we become complicit in what happens next." Because the truth is atrocities rarely continue because the world is unaware. They continue because the people with the power to intervene decide the costs are too high, and the rest of us decides there's nothing we can do. El Fasher forces us to confront that choice, not in the abstract, not in hindsight, but right now to ask, what are we going to demand? Thanks for listening. If this episode brought clarity to what's unfolding in Sudan, please consider subscribing, sharing it with someone who might care, and leaving a review. It helps to get these stories heard. Until next time, stay curious, stay critical, and stay connected.