Warnings grow of executions, ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s El-Fasher

Reports were mounting on Tuesday of ethnically motivated atrocities in the western Sudanese city of El-Fasher since its capture by paramilitaries, with allies of the army accusing fighters of executing “more than 2,000” civilians.

El-Fasher 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.

Allies of the army, the Joint Forces, said on Tuesday that the RSF “committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians in the city of 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 Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab said were coming 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”.

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This included what appeared to be “door-to-door clearance operations” in the city.

In a report published on Monday, it said the actions of the RSF “may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide”.

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.

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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 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 army, which has been fighting the RSF since April 2023, has also been accused of war crimes.

‘Harder to unwind’

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.

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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.”

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Foreign backers

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”.

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.

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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.