Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher: Siege Strategies and Field Killings

This article was originally written in Arabic by Mohamed Aletr.

After a siege that lasted about 18 months, the Rapid Support Forces announced on Oct. 26, 2025, that they had taken control of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, while the Sudanese army announced its withdrawal from the city. The fall of El Fasher into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces marked a pivotal point in the war that has been ongoing since April 2023.

During the months of siege, the city’s residents faced the threat of famine due to severe food shortages, coupled with a near-collapse of agriculture. Following the city’s fall, residents were subjected to what were described as “horrific violations,” “mass killings,” and “potential massacres.” While accounts of the killings that occurred after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces varied, all agreed that they were ethnically motivated.

Despite the difficulty of field documentation due to the de facto ban imposed by the Rapid Support Forces’ military deployment in El Fasher, through open sources, and by analyzing videos and satellite images, Misbar was able to document the siege and field killings in the city since the Rapid Support Forces took control of it.

The Road to El Fasher: Widespread Violations in Zamzam Camp

By last October, El Fasher had remained under siege for months by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in their ongoing conflict with the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied groups. For more than 500 days, humanitarian aid to the city had been cut off, according to the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan.

In addition to the victims of food insecurity, hundreds of civilians were killed as a result of the Rapid Support Forces’ bombing of the city during the months of siege and the ongoing attacks on its outskirts. Some of these attacks involved what were described as horrific violations, such as those in the Zamzam camp, where local sources reported that Colombian mercenaries managed the large-scale assault.

Satellite images show the aftermath of successive attacks on the camp, located less than 10 kilometers south of El Fasher. It had housed at least 500,000 displaced people before being taken over by the Rapid Support Forces in April 2025 and becoming “almost empty,” according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

High-quality satellite images from Maxar (now Vintor) also reveal fires and smoke from fires on the day of the invasion, April 11, which led to the immediate displacement of between 60,000 and 80,000 families who were already displaced in the camp.

Estimates of the civilian casualties in the Zamzam takeover range from 1,500 to 2,000. Since then, the Rapid Support Forces have used the camp, where the displaced people were taken, to launch ground and artillery attacks on El Fasher, which—since falling to the Rapid Support Forces—has witnessed widespread abuses and ethnically motivated mass killings.

Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher: Strategies of Siege and Field Killings

The Rapid Support Forces’ capture of the Zamzam camp did not resolve the battle for control of Darfur, but it did contribute to tightening the siege on El Fasher, the regional capital. At the same time, civilian casualties from artillery attacks and other acts of violence increased significantly since the beginning of 2025, coinciding with the intensified siege of El Fasher and a rise in attacks on its outskirts, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED).

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) besieged the city with earthen berms and targeted it with artillery shells and drones. There were also reports of civilians being targeted as they attempted to flee the city. Satellite imagery shows that the earthen berms exceeded two meters in height in some areas. The berms completely surrounded El Fasher, and after capturing the Zamzam camp, the RSF began to tighten the berm around the city further from the south.

On Oct. 25, the Rapid Support Forces advanced from behind their barricades and under artillery fire, storming the city of El Fasher with reinforcements from the south and tightening the siege from the north, with the aim of controlling military sites, most notably the headquarters of the 6th Infantry Division.

On the morning of Oct. 26, the headquarters of the 6th Infantry Division had fallen into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces, while the army forces withdrew under the cover of artillery fire. Armed Forces Commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said the withdrawal was meant to spare civilians and the city further systematic killing and destruction, according to a statement he read on Oct. 27.

But the army’s withdrawal did not spare civilians, at least not from the killings, many of which were filmed by Rapid Support Forces gunmen. Despite the RSF’s attempts to deny involvement in systematic killings targeting civilians, or to justify the killings as occurring within the context of field battles, satellite imagery shows that even those attempting to flee the city and cross the earthen berms to the north were also killed.

Assuming that those targeted by the Rapid Support Forces at the northern earthen barrier—at least nine kilometers from the city—were military personnel and not civilians, the RSF would still be accused of committing a war crime, according to Common Article 3 of the four Geneva Conventions, Article 41 of Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions, and Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, all of which criminalize attacks or killings against an armed person who has laid down his weapon or is no longer participating in combat or hostilities.

However, eyewitness accounts confirm that the Rapid Support Forces deliberately targeted civilians as they attempted to flee the city near earthen berms. According to testimonies obtained by Reuters from civilians who escaped El Fasher and managed to reach a camp in Tawila, the Rapid Support Forces shelled civilians with artillery as they tried to flee the city.

Ikram Abdel Hamid, one of the survivors, said that the Rapid Support Forces stopped her and those with her at an earthen barrier, separated the men from the women, and asked if there were any soldiers among the men. When none raised their hands, they opened fire.

Digital analysis of video footage also proves that the targeting evidence visible in satellite images at the earthen embankment, dated Oct. 27, is in fact civilian vehicles whose occupants were summarily executed.

In a series of videos analyzed by Bellingcat and Human Rights Watch, the location was pinpointed to the earthen berm. One video shows the vehicles before they were set ablaze; they are clearly white vehicles without any weapons on their backs. There appears to be no clash at the site, as the video shows the vehicles gathered and then set on fire.

According to the Sudanese news platform VISTA, the vehicles were part of a convoy that included civilians and political and military leaders who were on their way to leave El Fasher before Rapid Support Forces gunmen stopped and destroyed them.

In another video taken after the vehicles were destroyed, the bodies of victims can be clearly seen among them, wearing civilian clothes, with no weapons visible next to them.

Another video, published on Oct. 27 and located meters away from the burning vehicles, shows 10 people in civilian clothes, including one injured person, forced to sit in a line in front of Rapid Support Forces gunmen who eventually opened fire on them.

Repeated Ethnic Massacres

The Yale University Humanities Research Lab gathered evidence of mass killings by analyzing satellite imagery showing piles of bodies and pools of blood in various neighborhoods of El Fasher. The killings did not stop on the day the Rapid Support Forces seized control of the city but continued in the following days, as shown in subsequent images. A pile of bodies appears in an image dated Nov. 1 that is not present in an image dated Oct. 31. A third image, dated Nov. 6, shows what appear to be traces of fire at the site where the bodies had disappeared, suggesting they were burned.

The exact number of victims in El Fasher is still unknown, but a “senior commander” in the Rapid Support Forces told Sky News that at least 7,000 people were killed during the first five days of the Rapid Support Forces taking control of the city.

While Alaa al-Din Naqd, a political leader in the Rapid Support Forces’ founding alliance, denied the validity of the figure mentioned by the RSF military leader, the Sudan War Monitor platform, in a joint investigation with Sky News and Lighthouse Reports, quoted two RSF sources as saying that what happened in El Fasher was a “systematic massacre with ethnic motives.” The report said it was a revival of the massacres carried out by the Janjaweed militias—currently the Rapid Support Forces—in Darfur in 2003, which targeted, on an ethnic basis, the non-Arab tribes of the Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit.

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