Genocide Again in Darfur
- Katharine Houreld and Hafiz Haroun | The Washington Post
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Families shot down, held at ransom as they flee Darfur’s killing fields
The Washington Post
November 1, 2025
by Katharine Houreld and Hafiz Haroun
A woman rests in Tewila, in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, on Oct. 28 after fleeing El Fashir in the wake of the city's fall to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. (AFP/Getty Images)
Sudan’s RSF paramilitary and its allies have carried out mass ethnic killings and hostage taking in the captured city of El Fashir, survivors told The Post.
NAIROBI — Families gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother’s body in the desert. Doctors seized for ransom and executed.
Such are the stories trickling out of El Fashir, the Sudanese city conquered by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on Sunday. The vast majority of people inside the city are still unreachable; only a few traumatized people have been able to escape and testify to the horrors unfolding there.
Sudan’s civil war, which erupted in 2023 after a power struggle between the head of the RSF and the army chief, has become a sprawling conflagration, sucking in global and regional powers and leaving much of the country in ruins. The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates; Sudan’s army has received weapons from Iran, Turkey and Russia.
Now, a war that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives has entered one of its darkest chapters. The Washington Post interviewed nine civilians, doctors, aid workers and combatants in and around El Fashir, who described a frenzied and indiscriminate campaign of ethnic killings and hostage taking by the RSF and allied fighters.
As international outrage mounts, even the head of the RSF, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, has admitted to abuses by his forces. On Thursday, the group released a video showing the arrest of one of its commanders, who was filmed taunting and executing large groups of civilians.
The United States has already sanctioned Hemedti and other RSF leaders, as well as top figures in the Sudanese military (SAF), which has also been accused of war crimes. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators urged the American government to go further in light of what they called “the genocide in Darfur.”
“The RSF’s long-predicted ethnically targeted assault on the civilian population of El-Fasher makes clear that the United States must consider the designation of the RSF as a potential Foreign Terrorist Organization or Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization,” the senators, including James E. Risch (R-Idaho) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), the most senior members of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.
The statement was also notable for criticizing the UAE, a key U.S. ally, which has denied backing the RSF despite extensive evidence that it has provided the group with weapons and other military support.
“Foreign backers of the RSF and SAF — including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Russia, Iran, China and governments in the immediate region — have fueled and profited from the conflict and legitimized the monsters destroying Sudan,” the statement said.
Smoke billows from fires burning around the El Fashir airport on Oct. 26. (Vantor/AFP/Getty Images)
‘Death is everywhere’
A report from the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab said images from El Fashir’s former Children’s Hospital — inoperable for a year and used as an RSF detention site — and the nearby Saudi hospital indicated mass killings this week. About 460 people were reportedly killed in the Saudi hospital, according to the World Health Organization.
A doctor who worked in the maternity ward of the Saudi hospital said he was taken hostage by the RSF on Sunday and released Wednesday after he paid a $50,000 ransom. He was too heartsick to describe the killings he had witnessed, he said, and begged for help in securing the release of his fellow doctors. Like others interviewed for the article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons.
The RSF “have been killing people for years, and we haven’t seen anything done against them, so what’s the point of talking to you?” the doctor asked. “Just pay the Rapid Support Forces to release our colleagues. … Anyone who doesn’t [pay] will be killed.”
An RSF fighter told The Post that some of the doctors taken hostage were sent south to the town of Nyala, while others were executed alongside civilians. Nearly all the wounded patients in the Saudi hospital and other health centers in El Fashir had been killed, he said.
“The city was in complete chaos,” he said. “Fighters came from different areas, and no one could stop them.” Armed gangs from the countryside would probably be looting El Fashir for the next month, another RSF commander said. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“The accounts coming in are horrifying,” said an aid worker whose organization has spoken to more than 100 people who managed to escape the city and reach the town of Tewila, the nearest point offering aid and refuge.
“One person told us of three little children — all under the age of 4 — clustered crying around their mother’s body,” the aid worker continued. “Another man said civilians were running from the west of town and they were being shot at as they ran. One man said there was a body every 10 meters. … One man described running past another man, half his body had been blown away and he was begging for help.”
Displaced El Fashir residents arrive in Tewila on Oct. 28. (AFP/Getty Images)
Aid workers are deeply concerned about how few people have reached Tewila. Almost all El Fashir residents left as their city was falling; only a very small number have arrived since its capture. For months, starving Sudanese trying to escape the RSF siege of El Fashir were killed, raped or kidnapped. Aid groups fear the same fate has befallen those trying to escape now — on a much larger scale.
The United Nations said 260,000 people were left in El Fashir when RSF forces stormed the city; less than 5,000 people had made it to Tewila in the week since, according to Mathilde Vu of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
“People say there are so many bodies on the road and the smell of death is everywhere,” she said. Around a tenth of the families arrived with children who were not their own, she said, including one that showed up with a 6-month-old baby and another young child after their parents had been killed. Everyone who arrives is malnourished, Vu said.
One of the rare men to make it out of El Fashir told The Post that he had been spared only because starvation during the 18-month RSF siege had made him appear much older than his 55 years — he was stick-thin, with white hair and shriveled skin.
As RSF forces swept through the city, he recalled, hundreds of families sought shelter at the local university, which had sturdier buildings. “Everyone able to run or walk” was there, he said, “women, children, wounded and elderly.” As they huddled together, they were shelled and attacked with drones, he recounted. Then the gunmen came.
“First we were bombed, and then there was shooting,” he said. “More than 200 people killed, blood, everyone trying to escape. If there is a word to describe it, it must be genocide.”
Footage from the university verified by The Post shows a hallway strewn with bodies and men in RSF uniforms picking their way through, casually finishing off survivors with single shots. The white-haired man fled to a hill behind the university with his cousin and around 15 women and their children, he said, but RSF fighters were waiting for them.
“They robbed the women, took money and phones, then opened fire,” he said.
The man was detained and interrogated but released with five other men because of his elderly appearance, he said. “On all the villages and roads around, there were bodies,” he said, as his small group staggered toward Tewila.
Two days after arriving, a male cousin — whom he had left for dead — showed up, too, wounded in the head and unable to talk, he said. An aid worker in the camp verified his condition.
Displaced families shelter in Tewila on Oct. 27. (Mohammed Jamal/Reuters)
‘They must be killed'
Another man described leaving El Fashir as fighting raged, joining other desperate civilians until the group numbered nearly 600, including many children. RSF soldiers shot at them along the road, he said, killing at least five and scattering the group.
Then, he recounted, an RSF commander “approached us and told us to shout at the top of our lungs, ‘The Rapid Support Forces are above us! Hemedti is above us!’” Then he told us, “'You are civilians, go!’” But before they could move, the man said, an RSF armored vehicle began driving toward them, crushing everyone in its path.
“The commander kept repeating, ‘These are civilians, don’t kill them!,’” the man said, but “they ignored his words.” Eighteen people were killed, the man said, including one of his female cousins. Another cousin was badly injured, he said, and they had to leave her behind. The group made it only about 500 yards before being targeted again.
“‘These are slaves; they must be killed,’” he remembers the fighters saying before they opened fire. An additional seven people were killed, he estimated.
When the shooting stopped, the man said, an RSF soldier gave water to the survivors and told them to turn around because there was more killing ahead. But the group kept going, reaching an area known as Um Jalbakh, a stronghold of Arab tribes, many affiliated with the RSF. Many of the last remaining inhabitants of El Fashir, by contrast, come from African tribes affiliated with militias that have supported the military.
Displaced Sudanese in Tewila on Oct. 28. (Str/AFP/Getty Images)
Twenty years ago in Darfur, a mainly Arab militia — the precursor of the RSF — hunted down African villagers from the same ethnic groups in a mass killing campaign later recognized as genocide. Survivors say it’s happening again.
“Arab women and men attacked us on horseback and camels, whipping us,” the man said. “One of the Arabs shot a man and his wife. The man was walking with us, and the bullet hit his stomach. He was saying to us, ‘Please save my wife!’ We couldn’t do anything; we just prayed for him before he died, and we left his wounded wife.”
The group was ultimately loaded into vehicles by the RSF, he said, and taken to Zamzam camp, which had been home to nearly half a million people before paramilitary fighters captured it in April, slaughtering civilians and aid workers. The group arrived as around 20 men were being executed, the man said. A boy of about 12, wearing an RSF uniform, was the first to shoot, he said. The man said he began praying as the group was brought to an area marked “Prison.”
“They told us to stay put and that tomorrow morning they would bring a Starlink device so we could contact our families” for the ransom demands, the man remembered. “They threatened to kill anyone whose family didn’t answer.”
Originally, he said, the fighters demanded $28,000 from each person, a staggering sum, but the group was able to negotiate the figure down.
“In the morning, when the device arrived, I called my family,” the man said, and the fighters demanded $14,000. “If they didn’t pay it, they would kill me right then,” he said the fighters told his loved ones. His family sent the money, the man said, and he was released. Four others were unable to pay.
“I don’t know what happened to them,” he said.
Meg Kelly in Washington contributed to this report.
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